2 'Messy Habits' That Actually Boost Productivity, By A Psychologist
In the 1920s, a Berlin psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something odd about the waiters at a local café, according to a 2020 study published in Memory & Cognition that traces the discovery back to its origin. They could, seemingly our of habit, recite a long, complicated, unpaid order from memory with total precision, then lose every detail of it the moment the bill was settled.
The finding launched decades of research into why unfinished business seems to hang onto the mind more insistently than finished business does. That question, it turns out, is more complicated than it first appeared. It also points to something worth taking seriously about how sustained, high-quality work actually gets done: two of the most reliable habits behind it are ones that never look finished at all.
Neither habit is an argument in favor of chaos. However, both are a refusal to manufacture order before order has actually been earned, which turns out to be harder, and more useful, than it sounds.
What Zeigarnik documented in waiters extends directly to desks. An open draft, a half-built spreadsheet, a slide deck saved mid-thought instead of neatly closed out: these are all examples of what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect, and the mechanism is straightforward. An unresolved task stays cognitively “live”: a 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found some evidence people remember unfinished work better, but confirmed a real, durable tendency to pick it back up. This is the kind of readiness that a completed task immediately loses. That readiness is what makes it possible to sit back down at a project hours or days later without paying the full cost of reconstructing where things stood.
Wrapping a task up neatly, purely for the satisfaction of calling it done, can flatten the tension that would have carried the next good idea forward. The habit stops paying off, of course, when the open loop becomes a source of dread rather than a placeholder. There’s a meaningful difference between deliberately leaving something unfinished and anxiously avoiding it, and only the latter is doing useful cognitive work.
Efficiency culture treats a tidy desk as a proxy for a tidy mind, but the psychologist Kathleen Vohs complicated that assumption in a now well-known line of research. She and her colleagues found that people working in visibly disordered rooms generated more original, less conventional ideas than people working in orderly ones, according to a 2013 study published in Psychological Science. Having said that, a 2019 study published in Frontiers in Psychology that attempted to replicate the finding came up empty, so it’s best read as suggestive rather than settled. The orderly-room participants weren’t just more conventional, they were more generous and more likely to choose the healthy snack, too. Order didn’t make them happier workers; it made them more cautious ones.
The likely explanation is that a disordered environment loosens the mind’s grip on convention. Tidy, symmetrical spaces seem to cue rule-following; looser ones seem to cue exploration. That distinction matters more than it might first appear. For work that demands precision, like reconciling numbers or proofreading a contract, order still earns its keep. For generative work, disorder seems to buy something order can’t: a wider space of possible answers, rather than a fast retreat to the first respectable one.
Both habits are, underneath, a form of comfort with unresolved ambiguity. The psychologist Arie Kruglanski built an entire body of research around a related trait he called the need for closure, as a 2015 review published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology lays out: the urge to settle on an answer, any answer, simply to stop sitting with uncertainty. A high need for closure feels productive in the moment. It rarely produces the best answer available, since it favors the first tidy one instead.
People who leave tasks open and desks a little disordered are, often without naming it this way, tolerating more ambiguity for longer than convention recommends. That tolerance is uncomfortable, which is exactly why productivity advice keeps pushing in the opposite direction.
It’s also, on the evidence, where the better ideas and the smoother returns to interrupted work tend to come from. The reverse is worth noticing too: someone who clears every task and every surface before allowing themselves a break isn’t necessarily more disciplined. They may simply have less patience for the discomfort of a loose end, even in the moments when a little more of that discomfort would have served them.
None of this recommends chaos as a strategy. It recommends suspicion toward the urge to clean up too soon, on the desk or on the screen, before the mess has finished being useful.
Do you have a habit of hyperfixating on half-finished tasks hours after you’ve moved on? Find out how much mental space your last task is quietly still taking up with this science-backed test: Attention Residue Quiz