The Zeigarnik Engine: Turning Open Loops into Momentum

Photo by Amjith S on Unsplash

I’ve spent the past year with thirty tabs open in my brain. Some of them are essays. Some are plans. Some are wounds. All of them humming. I used to think this meant I was broken — lazy, disorganized, allergic to follow-through. That’s the story productivity culture sells: if your inbox isn’t empty and your checklist isn’t complete, the fault is yours. Not the system. Not the structure.

This essay came out sideways. Written in pieces between deadlines, in stolen time, while toggling between too many windows and not enough sleep. And maybe that’s exactly why it works — because it came out jagged, like everything else that still matters to me.

We are not wired for closure. We’re wired for tension, interruption, dangling threads. But we live in an economy that treats incompletion like failure — and sells us endless tools to fix it. Finish the task. Clear the inbox. Optimize the workflow. Productivity has become a moral category, enforced by dashboards and dopamine and deadlines. And if you can’t keep up, the fault — supposedly — is yours.

But what if the problem isn’t you? What if your brain’s resistance to neat resolution isn’t a flaw?

There’s something electric about an unfinished task. You can feel it in the back of your mind, just out of sight. It’s the email you almost…