NewsBreak Original

It’s Thursday morning and you have a report due on Friday. You start working on it, then realize that you have a meeting with your team. After the meeting, your coworker invites you to grab lunch. Your unfinished report is in the back of your mind during the entire lunch, and you are feeling anxious to get back to your desk and finish it. This psychological phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect.

During my first year working at an agency, I was overwhelmed with the amount of jargon and basic project management terms thrown around daily. My boss asked me to put together a Gantt chart to schedule our next project while team members were scheduling sprints — I basically spent that first year doing a significant amount of nodding, followed by just as much research.