When we have unfinished tasks, we think about them continuously. But the moment they are completed, we forget about them. If we have unread email, we constantly wonder what it says. But once it has been dealt with, we often cannot recall the details of it.
The name for this phenomena is called the Zeigarnik effect and named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.
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The Zeigarnik effect is our tendency to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks easier than completed tasks.
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