How do you stop binge-watching Netflix?
The answer uses the same mechanism for how you stop thinking about work when you’re not working.
When was the last time you watched 1 or 2 or 5 more episodes than you’d planned to?
When was the last time you watched 1 more movie than you’d planned to?
This speaks to a phenomenon I call the Open Loops Effect. (Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik Effect.)
We tend not to think much about the projects we completed last week; we think about the incomplete ones on our plates right now.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Researchers ran a study asking one of the following questions to 3 different groups of people:
1. Write about a project you recently completed
2. Write about a project you have not yet completed...and write a plan
3. Write about a project you have not yet completed
Then they gave them another task and studied both how many intrusive (distracting) thoughts they had about the project and also how much they could focus and remember from the task they were working on.
Unsurprisingly, the 3rd group–the one who wrote about an incomplete project–had more intrusive thoughts and remembered less than the 1st group–the one who wrote about a complete project.
But the insight comes from the 2nd group–the one who wrote about an incomplete project AND wrote down a plan for it: their focus and performance was just as good as the 1st group.
We can close Open Loops by either completing them or writing down how we will do so.
When we have made it EXPLICIT what we need to do and our minds trust that there’s an EXTERNAL parking lot where those actions are stored, our minds can release the job of holding onto them.
Or as David Allen says, “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”
Those are strategies if you want to reduce the number of thoughts that you're going to have about something.
But what if you want to increase the number of thoughts you have about something while you're not working on it or overcome procrastination and hit the ground running when you return to your desk?
You can strategically open a loop before you take a break–do the first few minutes or even seconds of the project or the task before you take a break and just like a Netflix episode, something in you will want to come back and complete the storyline, resolve the note.
The Open Loops Effect also answers the original question:
The best way to stop binge-watching Netflix is...don’t start something you can binge.
Watch movies instead. The loops close themselves.