Rientro is not a nice word, like all those that suffer from the prefix “ri”. Re-doing and re-repeating feel boring, re-entering and re-returning causes melancholy. Usually the harp is the novelty scent of the new season, but this time it seemed insufficient to re-motivate me. Until I found it on the American site Fast Company, which deals with occupational psychology, an irresistible piece: “Re-sending is good“.
Now, for those who hate making decisions, but are forced to, like everyone, every working day, it sounded like music. More, I have a naive predilection for American manuals, made up of a few concrete and effective moves accompanied by scientific explanations, even more convincing if the idea of resuming the routine bites and every fiber of the body tends to escape. I devoured it. The author is Amantha Imberbehavioral science expert and podcast author, “How I work” (How I Work) on habits and rituals of successful people.
Amantha starts from an assumption that can be shared by anyone who is a diesel and not a velociraptor, an owl and not a lark: there are days when fueling is difficult. Mind flickers away, energy and motivation have not yet arrived and sitting in front of the computer doesn’t seem like the most desirable of options. Especially now, if until the day before “holiday” meant the absence of commitments and deadlines.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Well, the trick is simple: if you’re inspired, fully immersed, and focused, don’t finish what you’re doing. Get stuck in the middle and complete the next day: it will be much easier to resume. The really difficult days are those in which you have finished your goal and you have to start from scratch, because the mind struggles to recreate the motivation, while completing what has already been started comes naturally.
Even the writer Ernest Hemingway had theorized it: “When you’re going fast, stop writing”, and he is said to stop every day in the middle of a sentence. Interrupting a task, a sentence, a research, a project at the most beautiful moment would also have the benefit of keeping attention alive in the brain, which hates jobs left halfway through and retains information until the task is finished.
Illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini
It’s called the “Zeigarnik Effect” after the psychologist who studied the phenomenon observing the waiters who can only memorize orders until they are finished. Then they forget, in a flash, and move on to the next table. This is also how the “cliffhanger” works, the suspended ending of the TV serieswhere the episodes are interrupted with a twist leaving the plot unfinished to arouse the desire for the next episode.
I tried: I left this page halfway through and today I resumed it in souplesse, reconnecting to the world more naturally. But above all: yesterday I went home early without feeling guilty for not having finished my work. And this no psychologist had yet foreseen.
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