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The boredom advice everyone repeats is wrong. Boredom doesn’t generate ideas — it processes them. Here’s how to make it work for you.
I’ll never forget the time my electricity went out for two hours on a Thursday afternoon.
It was awful. I couldn’t even make myself a cup of tea. Worse, I’d been circling the same structural problem in a chapter for almost three weeks, and I couldn’t open my computer to work on it. So, I cleaned out a kitchen drawer instead.
Somewhere between the dead batteries and the expired coupons, the chapter came apart and reassembled itself correctly in my mind’s eye.
I’d done something smart, albeit inadvertently, for the first time in weeks.
The part everyone gets wrong
You’ve heard the boredom advice. Put down your phone and let your mind wander. Ideas will come.
It’s true enough to be repeated and vague enough to be useless. What the studies on boredom have actually found is more interesting than the slogan.
In 2012, Benjamin Baird and colleagues at UC Santa Barbara ran an incubation experiment. Participants worked on a creativity task, then took a break. Some did a demanding task during that break. Some did an undemanding one. Some rested. Some had no break at all.
The undemanding task group won. By a lot.
Read that again: the people who did an undemanding task beat the people who rested. Doing nothing was worse than doing something mildly dull.
But this is not an argument against stillness. Meditation does a great deal of good for many people, and I’d never talk anyone out of it. But being calm and incubating an idea are separate jobs, and cleaning a junk drawer happens to be better at helping you incubate.
So, clean your junk drawer. Your brain wants a task it can safely ignore, and an empty mind gives it a big playground.
Boredom doesn’t generate ideas. It processes them.
This is the finding I wish someone had told me when I was writing my honours thesis many decades ago.
Baird’s participants improved on problems they had already seen. Their scores on fresh problems didn’t budge.
Boredom is not an idea generator. It’s a solver. It works on material you’ve already given it, and if you haven’t given it anything, it will happily spend the time reviewing your worst moments from 2009.
Wandering around hoping for inspiration is a lottery ticket. Wrestling with your muddy third chapter for 20 minutes and then washing the dishes is a system.
Consider the problem first, then use boredom to help you find a solution.
Not all boredom is equal
Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire asked participants to copy numbers out of a phone book for 15 minutes, then invent uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. A control group went straight to the cups.
Then the researchers ran a more passive version of the experiment. One group copied the numbers out. Another group only read them. The readers came up with more ideas than the writers.
The lesson from this study is oddly specific. You have to be stuck — that part is not optional, since the group that went straight to the cups came last. But once you’re stuck, the less the boredom asks of you, the more it gives back. This is why writing down numbers (or answering email) is not a break; it pins you down and puts your mind to work.
Neither is a meeting where you have to nod at appropriate intervals. That said, a meeting where nobody expects anything from you (and you’re not allowed to look at your phone), may be the single most underrated creative resource in your working life.
When boredom is the symptom, not the treatment
Here’s the flip side, and it’s the part that matters if you’re mid-draft.
Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson’s MAC model traces boredom to two separate failures. One is attentional: the task either overwhelms your mental resources or fails to use them. The other is about meaning, when the work has come loose from anything you value.
Both produce the same flat feeling. But they require opposite fixes.
When your own writing bores you, find out which problem you’re facing. Bored because the section is too hard and you keep sliding off it? Break it into smaller pieces.
Bored because it’s rote and you’re transcribing something you already understand? Make it harder on purpose. Write it from memory, or in a form that scares you a little.
If you’re bored because you don’t care about the chapter, no technique will save you. That’s a content problem. Cut the chapter and find another part that actually excites you.
A shocking conclusion
In 2014, Wilson’s team put people alone in a room and asked them to sit and think for six to 15 minutes. Nothing else. In one version, participants could give themselves an electric shock if they felt like it.
Some 67% of men and 25% of women shocked themselves. These were people who had said earlier that they would pay money to avoid that same shock.
Boredom is not restful. It’s unpleasant, and your phone knows it. This is why “I’ll just let myself get bored sometimes” fails as a plan. The discomfort shows up and your hand reaches for your phone.
So, engineer a plan for yourself instead of waiting for it. Pick one routine chore a day and do it with the phone in another room. The dishes. The walk to the mailbox.
Do it right after your writing session, while the problem is still warm. That’s it. No app needed, and no productivity system with a subscription fee.
Just enjoy some good, old-fashioned boredom.
Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week addressed how to break the cycle of procrastination. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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How do you embrace boredom? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me. To share, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
