In earlier posts about The Value of Giving Up and Delegating, I’ve talked about how you’re going to be asked about more things than you can keep up with. Handing off some of these tasks to others is a good way to make sure you keep your head above water. The other thing to keep in mind is, how do you keep track of all the things you’re still in charge of?

If you’re like I was a few years ago, you might try to just keep it all in your head. This is definitely a mistake. You’re going to be pulled in a lot of directions as a manager, and as each of your tasks gets interrupted for another one, your browser window is going to build up with a lot of open tabs. Much like your browser, your brain is going to have a lot of open loops. These unfinished tasks and open loops lead you to experience something called the Zeigarnik Effect.

What is the Zeigarnik Effect?

The Zeigarnik Effect is a controversial theory that suggests that incomplete tasks are more memorable than completed ones. While the validity of the theory has been questioned, anecdotally, I can say that having all these open loops creates a lot of distraction. With that distraction, comes tension.

When I was a new manager, a big source of stress was when I would remember one of my open loops. If you don’t deal with the task, you’ll forget again, and your brain will remind you randomly until it’s done. You don’t get to pick how or when. It could happen in the middle of a meeting or the middle of the night. It’s not a great situation to be in.

With all these ideas bouncing around your head, it’s going to be hard to focus on anything for an extended period of time. Let’s try to save ourselves some stress. How do we remove the tension that comes with all these incomplete tasks?

Writing it down

Sounds simple enough. Most of us have used project management software and scheduled meetings, so that’s easy enough. But as a manager, there will be plenty of other things to keep track of.

• Approving a vacation request
• Organize a meeting
• Creating meeting notes
• Pitch a new product feature
• Watching recorded calls from the sales team, customer success, or product managers
• Relay a message from one of your team members to someone else on the leadership team
• Send an email to an external stakeholder
• Discuss someone’s professional development aspirations with another cross-functional stakeholder
• Coach someone through a conflict
• Reorganize priorities based on team bandwidth

It’s not as simple as just being assigned a task and doing it. Write it down, prioritize it, schedule time for it, put it away for now. Focus on one task at a time so that you can get the most out of your time. Switching back and forth between 10 different tasks is a good way to finish the day with 10 incomplete tasks that will keep you up at night.