Why boredom is creativity’s most underrated productivity tool

We really have done something very impressive. We have almost eliminated boredom from both our professional and personal lives. But unlike, say, getting rid of smallpox, this achievement has yielded mixed blessings at best. There is always something to check, respond to, and optimise. Even the gaps between meetings are filled: a scroll, notification, a quick text or email update before the next discussion begins. We pride ourselves on this. And let’s face it, we love to appear busy. 

Responsiveness looks like leadership, and activity feels like progress. We manically multitask, and our brains are addicted to the hustle…but not the discipline of thinking. We warn our children from said behaviour yet turn a blind eye when it’s carried out in the pursuit of something nobler, work. And here is another observation.

Organisations that move fast don’t always see ahead 
They react quickly, execute and circulate information at impressive speed. But when it comes to original strategy, something that isn’t a variation of what everyone else is already doing, momentum slows. Or perhaps it’s that perfectly competent decision, suspiciously, like last quarter’s thinking just wrapped in new language. The faster the process, the more likely it is to favour familiar frames of reference. It feels safe. This isn’t because organisations lack intelligence or ambition. There are plenty of bright minds everywhere. It’s a reflection of the tempo we choose to operate within. 

Yet, we say we want innovation 
Then we engineer environments where the mind is never allowed to wander long enough to produce it. I don’t mean structural boredom, the kind Dan Cable at London Business School describes when work is fragmented into such small tasks. That sort of boredom drains performance.  I’m talking about something less comfortable and more deliberate. Cognitive space. Unallocated mental bandwidth. The moment when there is nothing pressing to respond to, and the brain, almost reluctantly, begins to explore.

When we’re not occupied with immediate tasks, the mind shifts into a different gear. It drifts. It connects ideas that don’t normally sit together. It wanders into questions we usually postpone.  We don’t like this state much. It’s uncomfortable. It feels unproductive. Slightly inefficient. And sometimes even indulgent. But it may very well be where the competitive edge begins.   Atlassian’s CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, embraced this ‘indulgence’ in what he called ‘ShipIt Days’. These are ‘twenty-four bursts of freedom and creativity’ to work on any idea or problem. 

Busy minds tend to play it safe
Keeping busy with multitasking is just switching our attention, and each switch uses up mental energy. If we do this all day, our thinking becomes limited. We might get more tasks done, but in the process, we lose some creativity. Moshe Bar and Shira Baror’s research in Psychological Science provides a helpful example. When people had to remember seven digits before a word-association task, they usually gave the most common answers, like white/black. 

People who only had to remember two digits came up with more creative and unusual pairings, such as white/cloud. When our minds are busy, we stick to the obvious. When we have more mental space, we think outside the box. Be honest, how much more delightfully descriptive is the word cloud versus white? 

In business, this difference really matters. Seven digits is like having a packed schedule and a work culture that treats everything as urgent. Two digits means having some breathing room. 

Cognitive space
This is the paradox most organisations are now living inside. We demand innovation from minds that are saturated. We ask for differentiation while designing schedules that reward reaction and time accountability down to the second. And for creativity, innovation and those brilliant ideas, we need time. Something apparently no one has these days.  None of this suggests we should glorify and promote disengagement. What is needed is not absence, but a more intentional kind of presence, one that, occasionally at least, tolerates stillness. Or perhaps strategic boredom. A restraint. The discipline not to fill every cognitive gap simply because we can.

Tempo control 
The executive who answers every message within minutes may feel indispensable. They are also training their organisation to expect constant availability and their own mind to operate in a permanent response mode. For a machine, response mode is efficient. For a human, it’s exhausting and rarely imaginative. Competitive advantage increasingly lies in tempo control. In the ability to decide which stimuli deserve attention, which can wait and in protecting stretches of thought that may produce nothing visible at first.  Soon, the organisations that can tolerate a little mental drift may be the only ones capable of original movement. The rest will remain busy, moving quickly along paths already mapped by someone else.