Leave the Last Panel Blank

I'm reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips's Bad Night. It's the fourth book in their Criminal series of comics. So far, I'm really loving the series and highly recommend it.

Bad Night starts off with the story of a comic strip artist who's evidently about to embark on a bad night. But before he does, he drops this little tip:

leave_the_last_frame_blank_blue.jpg

That really resonated with me. Before he leaves for the day, he intentionally leaves the last panel undone so that when he returns to work in the morning, he's got a small concrete task calling out to him to be finished.

That's a tactic that would work well with me. If I came in to work with a little unfinished task waiting for me, I'd want to dive right in and finish it. Doing so would have created a bit of "productivity momentum" that moves me right into the next thing I'm supposed to do.

Not only am I reading a world-class comic, but it starts off with a clever and useful productivity tip!


Disclaimer: I tweaked the original four-panel sequence to make it better suit this blog.

One comment on "Leave the Last Panel Blank"

  1. David on March 13th, 2017

    A few years later, I came across this post, about the same technique: Use the Zeigarnik Effect to learn to code faster.

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