What do you do with your time? I think the modern world has afforded us all more time than we know what to do with and we’re squandering it. I know this isn’t true for everyone, and certainly not true of people everywhere, but many of us live in a time of abundance and we’re not spending enough time being bored.
When we’re bored, we think. We get ideas. We let our mind wander. We ask ourselves; what if? We remember. We imagine. We relive. We learn. We reprioritize. We plan. We decide.
People of times past wished they could have spent as much time being bored as we now have the opportunity to.
And yet… so many are wasting valuable boredom time on countless hours of video entertainment. Have you watched the latest popular streaming episodic content?!? The first 3 hours are boring but if you stick with it the next 12 are amazing. How about that famous TV series from a decade ago? You have to watch that! It is only an 81-hour epic that you’ll want to watch twice. Have you scrolled through 72 hours of people dancing to a song from the 90s in the palm of your hand this week? Oh, and don’t forget your favorite sport has 9 games this weekend that you must watch every minute of. The broadcasting for which starts 2 hours earlier than the game.
Lately, I’ve been prioritizing boredom. I’m still learning how to do this but one way that has had an impact has been to do boring tasks without media playing.
Usually, if I’m mowing the lawn, showering, shoveling snow, working in the garden, driving, doing the dishes, etc. I’ll have a podcast on. I listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos that I learn from, so I thought that would be a net positive use of my time. But that only goes so far. I kept shoving new information in without letting myself have the time to use the information that I already collected. So, for now, I’ve been doing these tasks in relative silence… allowing my mind time to work, to distill, to create.
I almost always end up coming back to a work session or my bullet journal with tons of ideas for something new or something I’m working on.
Quoting Jeffrey Davis in a 2022 post in Psychology Today:
In a series of studies, researchers found that subjects who were asked to do mundane, boredom-inducing tasks were more creative afterward. Boredom is a “variety-driving emotion,” meaning that it primes us to seek out new and different — therefore creative — experiences and solutions.
I can say from first-hand experience, this is definitely true.
I plan to write more about boredom in 2026. Until then, stop reading this and go get yourself bored.