What Is The Importance Of Interruption?

Can Interruption of a task, help us in the completion of it?

Dr Saniya Aamir
The Startup
Published in
4 min readApr 17, 2019

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

How many times have you been interrupted while doing something?

Imagine you are studying for a big exam. You have started that one chapter you feared the most. Just as you are about to finish the second last line, your mother calls you for dinner. You reluctantly leave, but it is constantly on your mind. So, After the dinner what do you do?

Naturally, you would start from the exact same word you left at previously, put the two halves together and everything would make sense.

That's the power of incomplete tasks.

Somehow you remember an interrupted tv show or a half read line better than if it had been completed.

But why is that?

The Zeigarnik Effect:

Photo by Lefteris kallergis on Unsplash

In 1927, Bluma Zeigarnik, who was a Lithuanian psychologist, investigated the power of interruption on memory.

She came up with this idea after her professor Kurt Lewin observed how the waiters in cafes seemed to remember incomplete tabs better…

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Dr Saniya Aamir
The Startup

Just a dentist trying to make dental care more accessible… one article at a time