When you are finishing work for the day, resist the temptation to reach a natural conclusion. Then, watch what happens.
Some days, it can feel really hard to start work, especially work that requires deep, focused thinking. I had many moments while writing my latest book where I had a daily writing target to achieve but would instead sit staring at a flashing cursor for 20 minutes before something useful came out of my brain (although on some mornings, “useful” might be overstating things). All I wanted on these days was to get into flow and write, but my brain had other ideas.
Rachel Botsman, a world-renowned expert on trust and technology and the first-ever Trust Fellow at Oxford University, used to love the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. slot for her writing. She found she could do more work in those three hours than she could achieve during the rest of the day. But when she had kids, that slot disappeared.
While trying to find a new groove for her work having started a family, she discovered that one of the tricks to getting into flow was how she settled herself into work for the day. “How you start is really key to the rest of the day,” Botsman explains.
“A really easy trick I learned is: if you’re in flow the day before, don’t finish that paragraph. Get halfway through the paragraph, and then stop. Write the next sentence the following day because it makes it really easy to pick up. Days where you’ve completed something, and you’re starting again, they’re harder because you’re starting the engine from scratch.”
Organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant uses a similar strategy. He refers to it as parking on a downhill slope, given the ease that this act brings to getting back into flow the following day.
Some people call this idea the Hemingway Trick. Writer Ernest Hemingway once said, “When you are going good, stop writing.” Indeed, he was purported to have stopped each day’s writing session halfway through a sentence. Author Roald Dahl also used the same strategy to avoid the terrifying blank page confronting him in his morning writing sessions.
Not only does finishing halfway through a task give us momentum, it has the added benefit of keeping the information in our brain. Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik ran a famous experiment in 1927 in which she observed that waiters were better able to remember complex orders when the order was interrupted or incomplete. However, as soon as the order was finished, it faded from memory more quickly. Known as the Zeigarnik Effect, this research demonstrates that our brain hates unfinished business, so much so that it will hold onto the information until it gets closure.
In the case of the Hemingway Trick, our brain continues to think about the unfinished task and when we come back to it, our brain is primed to easily pick up where it left off.
PUT IT INTO ACTION
When you are finishing work for the day, resist the temptation to reach a natural conclusion before clocking off. Instead, deliberately finish halfway through a sentence, a slide, a line of code, or whatever the type of work you are doing. By finishing halfway through, you’ll find it far easier to get started the following day and have a much more time-wise morning.
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This article first appeared in https://www.fastcompany.com
Guest Author: Amantha Imber is the author of Time Wise (of which this article is an edited extract), the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and the host of How I Work, a podcast about the habits and rituals of the world’s most successful people.
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