Let's be Fwends #109:

Make the Zeigarnik Effect your best friend

“Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.” ~ Erich Fromm

The Zeiganarik Effect and Task Recall

I know - "The Zeigarnik Effect" sounds like a trippy cyberpunk dystopia novel, but it's actually a pretty interesting concept regarding the change in our ability to recall a task depending on whether it's finished or not: As long as a task is not complete, it is much easier for us to remember compared to completed tasks.

This is the common description of the Zeigarnik effect, but it has a flipside: As long as a task is not finished, it occupies precious short term memory, because for whatever reason our brain holds on to it.

One of the things I strive to accomplish is to get rid of the Zeigarnik effect - and forget every little piece of information as soon as possible: By storing it in a system that is structured and organised in a way that makes sure I will find the information the instance I need it.

A key element of this is to organise your knowledge system for retrieval, and not for storage.

Space for Humans - Space for Cars

If you'll ever need a visualisation of the ridiculous amount of space cars need - look no further than images of sports stadiums.

This is just mindblowingly stupid.

Environment-friendly Choices

The strange thing about complex systems is that our intuition about them is so regularly off that it's hard to make any useful decision without lots of data.

Quick question: What is more eco-friendly? A reusable organic cotton tote, or a single-use plastic bag? The answer is of course the organic cotton tote, but only if you reuse it roughly 2.375 times. Otherwise, across the board, the single use plastic bag wins.

Hannah Ritchie takes a look at some other counter-intuitive facts about the eco-(un)friendlyness of common choices

How yes/no is your thinking?

'Think in colour' is an experiment that examines how black and white your thinking is. The test visualises your thinking on the basis of how you answer the questions.

A Digital Clock made of - Pictures of Earth?

I'm on the Internet for 28 years now and I dare to say that I've seen some weird shit in that time. But nothing - nothing - prepared me for a digital clock made out of Google Earth images that look like numbers.

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends - As always, thanks for reading, and join me in pondering if a premature Zeigarnik effect and forgetfulness are essentially the same thing. 🤔