The finding launched decades of research into why unfinished business seems to hang onto the mind more insistently than finished business does. A 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found some evidence people remember unfinished work better, but confirmed a real, durable tendency to pick it back up. She and her colleagues found that people working in visibly disordered rooms generated more original, less conventional ideas than people working in orderly ones, according to a 2013 study published in Psychological Science. Having said that, a 2019 study published in Frontiers in Psychology that attempted to replicate the finding came up empty; it’s best read as suggestive rather than settled. How These 2 Habits Work TogetherBoth habits are, underneath, a form of comfort with unresolved ambiguity.