Another interesting way to interpret this is that perhaps the Zeigarnik effect is a good description of the "psychological" cost of unpaid technical debt. For i

Another interesting way to interpret this is that perhaps the Zeigarnik effect is a good description of the "psychological" cost of unpaid technical debt. For instance, during any project at my job I run into at least 5 things -- bugs, code improvements, components I could build to make this task easier -- and I jot them down. When I finish, I move on to the next feature, and that list grows to 10, then 15, then 30... the anxiety that "man I really need to fix this shitty codebase" actually affects me psychologically in tangible ways, and IMO is one of the under-talked about aspects of ignoring technical and design debt.