It's Sunday. September 6th.
In 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik noticed that waiters remembered unpaid orders perfectly and forgot them the moment the bill was settled.
Unfinished things stay loaded in memory. Finished things get released. Which is why six half-done tasks are more exhausting than twelve finished ones — you're carrying all six, all day, at low volume.
The useful part: your brain accepts a written plan as almost-closure. Naming when you'll do it releases most of the load without doing it.
Copy-paste this into your notes tonight:
The effect is strongest with exactly the things you are avoiding, because those are the ones your brain refuses to release. A task you genuinely do not care about does not hum. The humming is the tell.
Which also means the mental load you feel at the end of a day is not a measure of how much you did. It is a measure of how much you left open. Two people can have identical days and one of them is exhausted.
"[thing] — Tuesday, 15 minutes, straight after coffee."
Specific enough to count as a decision. That's what stops the humming.
Kevin | TodayIsTheDay
