The Zeigarnik Effect: the Power of the Unfinished

July 6, 2025July 4, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Adrian Zumbrunnen, a human interface designer, wrote recently about how “Blooma Zeigarnik [on the right] and her professor of Gestalt psychology were having coffee at a bustling restaurant…While waiting for the check, the two eagerly discussed an odd observation they both made. Somehow waiters seem to better recall bills that were still open than the ones that had been settled. It seemed like the moment a bill was paid, it vanished from the waiters’ memory. Based on this simple insight, Zeigarnik conducted a series of experiments that showed that unfinished tasks loom larger than finished ones.”

As I was fascinated by this idea, and after chasing down a few rabbit holes (see complete bibliography at the end), I came to learn that the unfinished has a certain power that finished items do not.

The term for this is the Zeigarnik Effect.

This is not hot news for quilters.

Joshua Everts defines it as the “power of unfinished business or interrupted or uncompleted activity to hold a privileged place in memory,” in other words, those undone tasks just won’t leave us alone. He notes that they “create a cognitive burden, weigh more heavily on the mind, and are more easily recalled than completed tasks.”

In another unsigned article, it states that the “Zeigarnik Effect explains why people are haunted by unfulfilled goals and may be more apt to recall what they haven’t achieved than what they have. Some have speculated that the cognitive burden of unfinished work causes some to see themselves negatively and contributes to such problems as impostor syndrome.”

But while it is not hot news for us, the people who coined the term UFO (Un-Finished Object), how do these unfinished objects affect us?

Zumbrunnen notes that “Unfinished tasks lead to cognitive tension, a feeling of restlessness and discomfort that makes us seek closure and come back to it again and again. This effect goes beyond remembering individual items on a bill. It affects whether we achieve our goals, our creative output, and how we pay attention.”

Carol and I were discussing our progress on our Posh Penelope blocks, and I wrote:

Public Service Announcement:

Another Public Service Announcement:
The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect, an urge to complete tasks previously initiated. Maria Ovsiankina, a colleague of Zeigarnik, investigated the effect of task interruption on the tendency to resume the task at the next opportunity.

Yes, let’s not confuse the two, although maybe what I was experiencing this week was more of the Ovsiankina effect? Nah. I’ve been working on this Posh Penelope quilt for forever, like since 2020. In my mind, the Ovsiankina effect is more like finishing making dinner. Or changing loads of laundry.

Yet Another Public Service Announcement:
What does the Zeigarnik Effect teach us about multitasking?
The Zeigarnik Effect makes a powerful case against multitasking. Focusing on one task at a time will avert intrusive thoughts of unfinished work that will only create delays in finishing all the tasks. Completion of each task approached sequentially instead of simultaneously will clear mental space for the next task.

Will you please stop with these Public Service Announcements:
Yes. But you should know that taking the first step on a project, no matter how small, can create enough tension when the task is interrupted to motivate the resumption of the task, doing an end-run around procrastination. (I can’t help you if you are addicted to your phone. That’s a whole other blog post.)

So I cut out the rest of the Posh Penelope blocks. Over the next few days, I’ll get to the sewing. Understanding that having this project hanging over my head (like an anvil) was in reality stopping my creative work, helped me get going in going forward.

Other Interesting ideas from Everts to aid in managing these open-ended tasks are:
• • Create intentional closure points in ongoing projects. Even if an initiative isn’t fully complete, establishing clear milestones allows your mind to experience completion moments.
• • Develop systematic ways to document and track progress. This helps reduce the mental load while maintaining awareness of important tasks.
• • Practice regular “mind clearing” sessions. Whether through journaling, team reviews, or simple list-making, giving your brain regular opportunities to process and organize open loops is crucial.

Reading this helped me understand the value of placing little labels (or “intentional closure points”) on my ongoing progress. With the BOM, it will run one year, so I know I’ll be finished with the blocks in December, and the quilt some time after that. With the quilting on my New York Beauties quilt, I mark the days so I know what I have completed as I want to finish this by early fall. With the Posh Penelope blocks, I made a chart to “document and track progress,” coloring in squares. These small signposts help me manage the tension that Zeigarnik identified, and keeps my quilting projects from torturing me with their incomplete state.

Good luck in all that you are working on–

Bibliography, by order of appearance:

Zumbrunnend, Adrian. The Power of Unfinished, blog.

Everts, Joshua. The Zeigarnik Effect: Understanding the Weight of Unfinished Business.

Unsigned article, Zeigarnik Effect, in Psychology Today.

How much does your anvil weigh? question on Reddit, my go-to source for internet information now that Google has jumped the shark and insists on putting resource-intensive AI into every answer.

Ovsiankina effect, discussed in the article on the Zeignernik Effect, Wikipedia.

Multi-tasking discussed in the Psychology Today Article (above), as is Procrastination.

And bonus: a video of Adrian Zumbrunnen talking about talking with bots, if you are into that sort of thing. Starts at 2 minutes in.

300 and Beyond · Appliqué · Patterns by Elizabeth of OPQuilt

Kraków Circles

June 7, 2025June 13, 2025 Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I have this line of patterns I call PatternLite. Usually they start out as just a block I’m kind of doodling around with and want to share. Then I decide I want to make it, and take a lot of photos, and work out some helps and aids and tips and tricks, and before I know it, it has blossomed into a full-fledged — or at least partly-fledged — pattern.

Kraków Circle started out as a free block on the post about my visit to that city, and touring all the churches. Then I thought it might be interested to try out Sharon Keightley’s circle method, since there are bunch of little circles in this design. And then I added a different view, different color way, and so on. Here’s my first stab at the little circles:

She has you use a long pin as your handle, and then using the shiny side of freezer paper, you ease up the fabric, ironing to make it stick (Iink is below) I usually do the gather-stitch around the outside, and then slip in a plastic circle and press, with some spray starch. That just did not work on these little orbs:

You can see how over-full they are. The first try with this, it took me about five minutes and the circle was a bit of a mess. But after about 7 or 8 tries, they were nice and round, so I re-did the gather-circles.

Here’s my one-minute video and I hope inserting the video works! (I’m trying something new.) I know there is a little bump on the circle’s outside, but when I appliqué that, I can ease it in with my needle.

Here’s Sharon’s version of making circles. And she also has a version for the petal shapes, too, found on her page of Appliqué Video Tutorials.

I use Painter’s Palette Solids, purchased from here. This has been my go-to color scheme for years, ever since this quilt, but I was happy to see that it also drew on the stained-glass windows from Krakòw.

I bagged the pieces for the blocks, so I wouldn’t get lost.

I made a placement guide for the block, which is included in the pattern. I also added a print-a-ton-of-circles-at-once page, at the end.

I printed that page onto freezer paper, the how-to shown on this post. Sometimes, I chunked the 12 circle sections together, layered them up carefully, stapled the pages together, and then cut them out.

I also folded the freezer paper into smaller pieces, layering it up, then traced on a petal. Staple the layers so they won’t shift, as shown.

In the pattern, I give the tips for tracing the placement guide, and here, I’ve slipped the block underneath, taping it into place. (The placement guide is pinned to a board, but you could also tape it to a workspace.)

One all pinned into place, and another ready to come off the pinboard.

I was listening to a book, so I can’t tell you how long it took me to appliquè these all in place (maybe 90 minutes?) but it didn’t feel tedious, as the circles had been prepared.

I flipped over the block when I was finished, and cut out a small circle from the back — and slipped the paper out. Sharon Keightley suggests that cutting it out in a circle (instead of just cutting a slash) will keep the quilt back more intact.

I slipped out the freezer paper from the larger pieces as I appliquéd them.

Here’s the thumbnail of the pattern: it grew from 3 pages to nine. However, I’ve still priced it as a PatternLite — less than a slice of pizza, a pot of basil from Trader Joe’s (ask me how I know), or a Kouign Amann pastry from a bakery in Kraków.

If you like to make circles, here you go–

Pattern can be purchased in my PayHip Pattern Shop. If you have the introductory version, this one may be more helpful.

Flying Through Rainbows

April 29, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

In a series of interviews with new poets, they each expressed their confusion, discussed their work ethic, and acknowledged the daily drudgery — and joy — of being able to create and work. (See some quotes, below.) Do I wish I’d saved the source information for my series of quotes from these young poets at the beginning of their career? Yes, but knowing the internet, it is probably gone. I copied and pasted them into my digital calendar, and they pop up like clockwork every January. Fitting. We all begin creating at the beginning.

We seem to go full-steam in January, the new year giving us a fresh start. But lately, on Bluesky and Instagram, I am hearing often how the well some quilters usually dip into has run dry, that their “sewjo” or “mojo” is just not there. Is it because we are tired of winter? Or that we have early spring fever? Or just that creativity runs in spurts, and we have to step away every once in a while and get back to “real life” with its rainbows, as well as its tornadoes and sudden squalls?

In a slightly related idea, my husband’s father hung crystals in his window so they could flash rainbows around in random ways when the sun came shining through. Today, as my hands fly over the keyboard, typing this post, rainbows are dancing on my fingers, courtesy of two crystals hanging in our window right now from my husband.

Carol and I made a pact to apply our rotary cutters to fabric and our noses to the grindstone and Make This Quilt: Posh Penelope by Sew Kind of Wonderful. While I usually like to be sewing my own designs, this year, this level of drama, this level of chaos has sent me to “let go of the pressure to be innovative,” as Jane Freilicher puts it (qtd. in Emily Skillings, below). We committed to making four blocks per month.

But even in creating between someone else’s lines, there is room for fabric choice, pawing through the stash or scraps — for as Carol noted this week, all our fabrics are soon going to cost a bazillion dollars — and this month, I went for blues. I thought the blues might calm down the riot of colors I had going on, with their steady approach. After all blue is the color overhead in our sky and of the water that surrounds us and we’ve been crazy for blue way before Yves Klein first mixed up a batch of his trademark Klein Blue. Klein noted that:

“Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.” Fascinated by … it, [he made] …roughly 300 monochrome paintings in his signature International Klein Blue” (qtd. in article linked above).

(These blues read a bit more red-blue, or purple.)

All of these notes are to say, take a look at these young poets’ advice on if you get “quilter’s block,” or “writer’s block” and just give it time. Take a break to breathe in some of the blue overhead, or swim in the watery blue. Or catch a rainbow on your keyboard, courtesy of a defracting hung crystal.

Block by block, I’m making a quilt. I’m up to 23, and the goal is 42.

Advice if you are going to make this pattern: Do more than one block at a time. Do…like four. It’s easy, but complicated, and better if you don’t have to remember all the bits every time. And I say, make the “petal blocks” but before you sew it all up with the sashing, choose your itty-bitty center then, when you can see if it needs a pop, or if it’s okay to just have a fabric from one of the petals. Or do as Carol is, using a single fabric in all the centers. Hers is a black and white linear pattern, and it looks great.

Now I’ll put these all away in their box until next month, along with a a few scraps and bits and bobs, and it will wait for me until next time. After all, as Fatimah Asgha notes, “you’re on no one else’s timeline.”

One Last Thing

A friend had a new baby boy and I made them a quilt.

Pattern is Azulejos, from my pattern shop on PayHip. I just used fewer blocks to make it baby-sized. (And she gave permission for the photo.)

Happy Waiting-Until-You-Feel-Like-Stitching!

Quotes from Young Poets

Emily Skillings–
One question I am still grappling with is how to negotiate a balance between “innovation,” constraint, and intuition. The painter Jane Freilicher put it best, I think, when she said, “To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.” There’s also, I think, a quieter quote somewhere about her letting go of the pressure to be innovative, and that she felt she could really paint after that, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
This sounds a little strange, but I like to think of my life so far as a writer as a kind of oscillation between states of openness and movement and states of stillness and solitude. There are islands of production, productivity, and then pockets of…nothing. I think I am grateful to my depression in this way, in that it often forces me to be still.

Phillip B. Williams–
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course.

Mario Chard–
Writer’s block remedy: The impasse is never with the writing itself; it is with the reasons to keep going.

Fatimah Asghar–
Writer’s block remedy: I take a break. I think that if you bang your head against the wall trying to create, you’re going to resent the process of creation. Usually when you reach an impasse it’s a signal to move on to another thing. Maybe you haven’t slept in a while. Maybe you need some time to ponder, to just stare at the wall. Maybe you need to live, truly be alive for a little and not near a computer [or sewing machine]. Maybe you need to read, see, watch—to refill your well.

Advice: I’d say you’re on no one else’s timeline.

Solmaz Sharif–
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie. Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it.
I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be?

My corollary: Make the quilt you want to fight for. Fight for it. Acknowledge the arc of your quilting life.

300 and Beyond · First Monday Sew-day · Quilt-A-Long · Quilts

A Life Full of Yes

April 4, 2025April 3, 2025 Elizabeth E.11 Comments

Candy Clark, who has just published a book of Polaroid photographs of her younger life with the Hollywood stars of her era noted in a recent article that looking backward to this time wasn’t “necessarily a bad thing. I found out who I was putting this book together,” she said. “It’s a life full of a lot of yes.”

And then I saw this. Here.

And I said yes.

And with that, I met a whole other world of quilters, who do hand-sewing, EPP, have repro in their stash, spend a year to make 900+ wee little blocks, and think nothing of it. They say yes on an enormous scale.

Thank you Taryn, for introducing me to another leg of the three-legged quilting stool: traditional, modern, and art. I don’t know quite where I fit into that schematic, and it’s not like I’ve not known about traditional, but really…I haven’t known about this.

Gladi’s blocks drew me in (1); Anna has used EPP for her blocks (2); Susan hand-pieces hers and they travel with her, and writes the location where the block was sewn. I’ve been looking for a travel project, and so this intrigues me. I might say yes to this.

My tiny start (click arrows to advance the slides):

Initially, I’m trying it out with freezer paper, but I might use all methods of construction. I like the idea of carrying it around for a bit, but I also like sitting at the machine and sewing, too. Here’s the little video I put up this week showing my enthusiasm. Whether it be for this new project, or an enthusiasm for avoiding all the tasks I had on my To-Do List that day, I don’t know.

Before the pandemic hit, we had a little beginner’s sewing group going (called First Monday Sew-day — more beginner lessons are found at the link). I did samples of all every size of the Square-in-a-Square blocks in yellow and blue then sewed them up into a table runner ( so this is not my first Thrift/Economy Block rodeo). Here is the free downloadable 2-page handout we gave out to help the group learn to sew these blocks, with lots of sizes:

FirstMondaySewday_4_2020_OPQuilt Download

And below is the free downloadable Economy Blocks handout to go along with this version of Taryn’s wonderful gathering of happy quilters. The first page has some tips and tricks for freezer paper piecing, if you haven’t tried it before:

Two Sizes Economy Blocks_OPQuilt Download

NOTE: This does not in any way replace Taryn’s handout, nor include you in the group of quilters she has gathered (use the Instagram links above). The pages with all the blocks, however, may also prove useful if you are using paper-piecing, as you can print off more blocks at once. I put it up here in case you might find what I worked up helpful in any way. As always, I include my request: Please do not print off millions for friends, but instead, send them here to download their own copies. Thank you.

I figure if I decided to do EPP, I can print out the page of blocks onto heavier paper, and use that. For the record, I’m making 3″ blocks, as the smaller size is just too much for my tiny brain to process right now.

Lastly, I had fun watching this video of Karen, from Just Get It Done Quilts make these blocks in three different ways. She’s amazing! And please note my tip for keeping the freezer paper on the block in my Economy Blocks handout (above).