My brain loves finished business.

Check the box. Send the email. Make the phone call. Put the thing away. Cross it off the list.

Done.

Ahhhhh.

I know I am not alone in this, and I was intrigued when I learned that there is science behind our dislike for things that feel unresolved. The American Psychological Association describes the Zeigarnik (zeh-GAR-nik) Effect as the tendency for unfinished or interrupted tasks to remain more mentally accessible than completed ones.

Basically, our brains have a way of keeping unfinished business hanging around, front and center, even when there isn’t anything useful we can do with it right now.

And if there is one profession absolutely lousy with unfinished business, it is education.

But then I started thinking about the rest of my life.

Life Is Pretty Much One Giant Collection of Unfinished Business

Unless you pay cash for everything, you have payments to manage.

Relationships? Never finished.

Laundry? Please.

Cleaning, dishes, groceries, yard work, vehicle maintenance, exercise, eating well, managing appointments, taking care of our health…

We finish these things only in the most temporary sense.

Nobody empties the dishwasher on Tuesday morning, stands back proudly, and announces:

Well, thank goodness I never have to do THAT again.

We know the dishes are coming back.

And most of the time, we’re relatively okay with that. We understand that these aren’t really tasks to be permanently completed. They’re parts of our lives that require ongoing attention.

So why does unfinished business at school make us so crazy?

I think part of the answer is that school creates many different kinds of unfinished business and our brains don’t necessarily file all of them under “things I’ll get to tomorrow.”

The Literally Unfinished Stuff

This is the obvious category.

The bell rings before you finish the lesson.

The stack of grading is still sitting there.

You planned to answer those emails during your prep, but somebody stopped by your room and there went 20 minutes.

You have six things on today’s list and managed to finish four.

You started cleaning up the classroom library but didn’t get it put back together.

You meant to make tomorrow’s copies. You didn’t.

These are relatively easy to recognize as unfinished business because they look like tasks.

But school gives us other kinds, too.

The Interrupted Stuff

Teachers rarely get to move through a day in a straight line.

You start one thing. A student needs you.

You start again. The phone rings.

You get halfway through something. There’s an announcement.

You sit down during your planning period determined to knock out your list and someone appears in the doorway with, “Do you have a minute?” It’s never a minute.

By the end of the day, we may have touched fifty things and completed like nine of them.

The work isn’t necessarily overwhelming because every individual task is enormous. Sometimes it’s exhausting because our attention has been repeatedly pulled away from things before our brains get the satisfaction of finishing them.

The Unresolved People Stuff

Now we’re getting into a different kind of unfinished business.

You have a parent meeting and get ripped up one side and down the other.

You explain what you can. Maybe you barely get a chance to explain at all.

The meeting ends because somebody has somewhere else to be—not because anything actually feels resolved.

And now what? There’s no checkbox for that.

Parent meeting: Done.

Technically, yes.

Your brain?

Oh, we are absolutely NOT done with this.

So you replay it.

You think of the thing you should have said.

You formulate a much more eloquent response while shampooing your hair.

You explain your side beautifully to an imaginary audience at 2:00 AM.

Because the meeting ended. Your need to process what the heck just happened did not.

The Unfair Stuff

This one deserves its own category.

Something happens that feels unfair, inaccurate, unreasonable, or just plain wrong—and there isn’t necessarily a mechanism for making it right.

Someone makes an accusation that you don’t believe is true.

A decision is made without your input.

You’re held responsible for an outcome you couldn’t completely control.

A colleague doesn’t follow through and the consequences land on you.

You’re given another responsibility when your plate is already full.

Maybe you speak up. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you speak up and nothing changes anyway.

That leaves a particularly sticky kind of unfinished business because our brains don’t just want an ending.

We want a fair ending.

We want the misunderstanding corrected. We want somebody to acknowledge what happened. We want the person who made the decision to understand its impact. We want the apology. We want the explanation. We want somebody to say, “You’re right. That wasn’t okay.”

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn’t.

So our brains keep returning to the case, apparently hoping that the endless mental retrial loop will finally produce a different verdict. 

But you and I both know that replaying is not the same as resolving.

The “I Know This Isn’t Over” Stuff

Then there’s unfinished business that technically hasn’t even happened yet.

You addressed the behavior today, and you strongly suspect you’ll see it again tomorrow.

You had the conversation with the student, contacted home, documented it, followed the plan.

And still your brain says:

We’ll be dealing with this again tomorrow.

That’s a particularly difficult kind of unfinished business because there may be nothing else to do right now.

But our brains confuse nothing more I can do today with this isn’t solved yet.

Those are not the same thing.

Sometimes the work we were responsible for today actually is finished.

The situation just isn’t resolved. Maybe it just can’t be yet. Sometimes resolution is a process and it is really hard to be patient while the process does its work.

That’s an important distinction.

Maybe “Caught Up” Is the Problem

I wonder how many educators are carrying around an assumption that sounds something like this:

If I were organized enough, efficient enough, experienced enough, had more hours in the day, or people stopped making more work for me, eventually I would be caught up.

Would we though? Because what exactly would “caught up” look like in a school?

Every child understands everything you’ve taught. Behavior issues are resolved. Parents are satisfied. All relationships are healthy. Every email has been answered and every paper graded. Every lesson for the foreseeable future is planned. All committee work is complete. Every struggling student has their needs met. Everyone agrees with every decision you’ve made. And – bonus – nothing unexpected is coming tomorrow.

Cool. See you never.

What if “caught up” isn’t a reasonable measure of whether we’re doing our jobs well?

We Don’t Do This With the Laundry

This is the part that fascinates me.

I can do three loads of laundry on Sunday knowing full well there will be dirty clothes in the hamper again that same night.

I don’t interpret that as evidence that Sunday was a pointless disaster and that my family is completely unreasonable for not spending the rest of Sunday naked with their drawers full of clean clothes.

Laundry comes back. So do groceries, dishes, and bills.

Relationships require another conversation.

Bodies require another workout, another meal, another night’s sleep.

We’ve accepted that much of adult life consists of things that aren’t meant to be finished.

They’re meant to be tended.

What if we started thinking about some of our work at school the same way?

There will be more grading. There will be another difficult behavior.

Someone will misunderstand us. Tomorrow’s lesson will need planning.

A student we’ve already helped will need help again.

That’s not necessarily evidence that we’re falling behind. 

It might be evidence that we’re doing work that is ongoing by nature.

What Is Actually Mine to Finish?

None of this means educators should shrug their shoulders at unreasonable workloads or broken systems.

Some things are unfair. Some workloads are unsustainable.

Some expectations need to be challenged. Some conversations need another conversation.

Some problems need administrators, parents, counselors, support staff, unions, school boards, or entire communities involved in solving them.

We don’t have to slap a positive thought on every problem and call it personal growth.

But we can start separating two things:

The unfinished business itself.

And…

The story we’re telling ourselves about what it means that it’s unfinished.

Maybe I didn’t finish everything because I failed to manage my day.

Or maybe I didn’t finish everything because everything was never finishable.

Maybe that parent is still angry because I handled the meeting poorly.

Or maybe I listened, explained what I could, behaved professionally, and the parent is still angry.

Maybe that student’s behavior will happen again tomorrow because I haven’t figured out the right intervention.

Or maybe human behavior is complicated, change takes time, and one good response was never going to magically solve it.

Maybe I should keep working tonight. Or maybe I’ve done what belongs to today.

Those thoughts produce very different evenings.

Some Work Isn’t Meant to Be Finished

Maybe one of the skills that helps us stay whole in education isn’t becoming phenomenally efficient at getting everything done.

Maybe it’s learning to recognize when done isn’t available.

Then we can ask a better question:

What have I done for today?

Write down what needs your attention tomorrow.

Decide what actually deserves another conversation.

Identify what is within your control.

Notice what you’re mentally trying to resolve even though there is nothing you can do about it tonight.

And then practice leaving some unfinished business unfinished.

Because teaching is never finished.

Neither are relationships, or caring for our homes, or raising children, or becoming the people we want to be.

The most important things in our lives aren’t projects we complete.

They’re things we tend.

We don’t need to get better at finishing everything.

We need to get better at deciding when we’ve done enough for today—and allowing the rest to wait until tomorrow.

Your most important work is going to be unfinished, and your day can still be done.