The Case for Boredom: Why Doing Nothing Is a Power Tool for Creativity, Clarity, and Sanity

Everyone is sprinting. Timelines scream. Notifications carb-load. And in the middle of that chaos, you’re told to “stay inspired.” Nonsense. If you want sustained creative work—work with bones, not sugar—stop chasing inspiration and engineer… boredom.

Boredom isn’t a bug in the human OS. It’s a feature. It’s here to signal and to steer. Use it well, and the noisy surface of life quiets down just enough for the good ideas to float up.

This is the field guide I wish I had years ago.

Collect a print from the awarded series here.

What boredom actually is (and isn’t)

Boredom isn’t laziness, and it isn’t the absence of options. Psychologists describe it as an emotion that pops up when (a) you can’t keep your attention engaged and/or (b) what you’re doing feels meaningless. That’s the Meaning and Attention Components (MAC) model: boredom = “I can’t focus here” or “I don’t see the point here.” The fix isn’t more stimulation; it’s better alignment; either make the task meaningful or tune the demands so your mind can latch on.

Philosopher Andreas Elpidorou goes further: boredom is a regulator. It’s your inner project manager tapping the watch: “This is not it. Move.” That discomfort isn’t punishment; it’s guidance. Nudging you out of dead zones toward something that actually matters.

Translation: boredom’s job is to push you from mindless scrolling to meaningful doing, or sometimes to push you into stillness so your mind can regroup.

Why “doing nothing” helps you do everything (better)

When you stop hammering your brain with novelty, several nice things happen:

1. Attention recharges. Like a lens cooling down. You get back the mental wattage you’ve been donating to pings and red dots.

2. Meaning re-emerges. Without constant noise, you can hear the quiet “why” behind the work. What the picture, paragraph, or product is actually for.

3. Associations light up. The wandering mind makes weird, beautiful connections—the raw material of ideas.

There’s empirical backing for this. Multiple studies show that boring tasks can prime creativity. In a classic experiment, participants who first endured a boring activity (like reading or copying phone numbers) later generated more original ideas than controls. The likely mechanism is mind-wandering/daydreaming, which composes new links while the front of your mind is off duty.

Boredom is not anti-work. Boredom is pre-work.

The two good kinds of boredom (and the one to avoid)

Think of boredom like hunger:

• Signal-boredom (good): short, acute. It says, “Wrong task / wrong difficulty / wrong meaning.” You can fix it.

• Fallow-boredom (also good): deliberate idleness. Fields rest between crops; creative minds should too.

• Chronic boredom (avoid): long-term disengagement; often tied to poor fit, unmanaged attention, or life context issues. This one correlates with worse outcomes and needs real changes, not just a walk without your phone.

The article you’re reading is a manual for the first two.

How to practice boredom on purpose (so it helps, not hurts)

Below is a toolkit you can adopt today. It’s simple, slightly uncomfortable, and absurdly effective.

1) The 10–10–10 Reset

• 10 minutes doing nothing (sit, breathe, stare at a window).

• 10 minutes of a low-demand, mildly boring task (wash dishes, sort a drawer, walk the same block—no podcast).

• 10 minutes on your meaningful task with a very small, clearly defined goal (write 150 words; review 10 photos; sketch one frame).

Why it works: you drain the novelty addiction, let the mind wander, then channel that drift into a focused nudge. The MAC model loves this sequence: attention and meaning realign.

2) Build a boredom pantry

Make a list of five low-stimulus tasks you can do anywhere: sweeping, folding, hand-washing, walking a loop, organising memory cards. These are not procrastination; they’re cognitive palate cleansers.

3) Device fasting (micro-windows)

Three times a day, 15 minutes phone-free. No music, no social, no email. If that sentence makes you itchy, that’s exactly the point. You’re training the tolerance that modern feeds bulldozed. (If you need evidence that our boredom tolerance collapsed, see pandemic-era psychology explainers on why we became allergic to being alone with our thoughts.)

4) Framing trick: rename it

Don’t call it “bored.” Call it “white space.” Designers leave margins for a reason. So should you.

5) Stop mid-flow on purpose

End a work session one step before a natural finish. Hemingway did this with sentences; photographers can do it with contact sheets. You’ll re-enter tomorrow with built-in traction, not a cold start. White space preserves momentum.

6) The Two-Gate Check (fix the source of boredom)

Ask:

• Attention gate: Is the task too easy or too hard? Adjust difficulty.

• Meaning gate: Do I know why this matters? If not, articulate the point in one line before proceeding. That’s the MAC model in practice.

Boredom for creative people (a workflow you can steal)

Here’s a weekly cadence that turns boredom into output.

Monday: Fallow morning

• 45′ walk without phone.

• 20′ contact sheet (or whatever your work is) review (no ratings).

• 10′ list: “What’s alive right now?” Then pick one image/idea.

Tuesday–Thursday: Focused sprints

• Start with the 10–10–10 Reset.

• Two 60′ deep-work blocks.

• Between blocks: one boredom-pantry task.

Friday: The drain

• Take the most boring admin chunk and do it first (inbox, receipts).

• Reward: 90′ creative play (no brief, no goal, just materials).

Weekend: Long boredom

• Half-day with nothing scheduled. Camera allowed; phone on aeroplane mode. If you come back with only a question, that’s a win.

If that looks too easy… good. We’re not trying to impress anyone with busyness. We’re trying to make work you can stand behind.

Common objections (and the real answers)

“I don’t have time.”You don’t have time for endless micro-dopamine, either. Trade three 15-minute scrolls for three 15-minute boredom blocks. That’s 45 minutes of reclaimed attention per day. Week after week, that’s a different brain.

“I get anxious when I’m bored.”Totally normal. Start with micro-boredom: 3 minutes. Grow to 5, then 10. Pair it with slow exhale breathing (longer out than in). Anxiety often comes from withdrawal—the novelty tap shuts off, your nervous system complains, then settles.

“I tried and got nothing.”Great. “Nothing” is the soil, not the harvest. Keep showing up. The studies didn’t find instant genius—just a reliable increase in idea generation after boring priming. You’re stacking odds, not summoning lightning on command.

Where the science lands (short, plain, useful)

• Boredom = signal + steering. When attention or meaning misalign, you feel bored; the feeling nudges you to change tasks, change difficulty, or reconnect with purpose.

• Creativity boost: Priming with boring activities increased originality in subsequent tasks; likely mechanism = mind-wandering/daydreaming.

• Use, don’t fear: Writers, artists, and executives who deliberately schedule “white space” report better decisions, a more resilient mood, and fewer junk ideas shipped fast.

• Caveat: Chronic boredom (boredom-proneness) correlates with worse outcomes; the fix there is redesigning life inputs, not just sitting more.

Boredom vs. burnout (they look similar; they’re not)

• Boredom says: “Not engaging” or “Not meaningful.”

• Burnout says: “I’m exhausted; my resources are gone.”

Antidotes differ. For boredom, re-align meaning/attention or hold still. For burnout, rest, get sunlight and movement, strip commitments, and rebuild capacity first. Don’t apply the boredom toolkit to a burnout problem—you’ll just feel worse.

How boredom sharpens taste

Your style—anyone’s style—isn’t what you like. It’s what you’re willing to exclude. Taste is subtraction. Boredom is where subtraction becomes possible.

When you remove constant stimulation, you notice tiny differences again: the way a sleeve falls, the weight of a shadow, the rhythm between two frames. That’s taste training. That’s where your work stops being “a picture” and starts being your picture.

The etiquette of boredom in a dopamine economy

If you do this seriously, you’ll feel out of sync with culture for a bit. Everyone else is sprinting. You’ll be… looking at a wall. Good.

A few practical rules:

• Tell people you’re slower by design. You’re not ignoring; you’re protecting attention.

• Batch your comms. One or two windows a day. People adapt.

• Quit the performative busy. Nobody good is impressed.

• Schedule white space like a meeting. Because it is one with your future work.

Mini-routines you can paste into life

• Elevator rule: never pull your phone out in queues or lifts. These are built-in boredom reps.

• Commute rule: one direction with sound, the other in silence.

• Kitchen sink rule: wash by hand once a day. Monastic, mildly annoying, strangely generative.

• Pocket notebook: when ideas pop during fallow time, write a noun and verb, nothing else. Don’t break the spell with a 300-word plan.

When boredom backfires (and what to do)

If “boredom practice” makes you spiral—restlessness, irritability, self-critique—try these:

• Shorten the window. Three minutes.

• Change the posture. Walk instead of sitting.

• Add a gentle anchor. Hold a warm mug; look at a fixed horizon.

• Return to meaning. One line: “Why am I making this?” The MAC model says meaning is half the puzzle; don’t forget to feed it.

A closing argument (and an invitation)

You don’t need more hacks. You need room. Boredom is that room—an emptiness that isn’t empty at all. It’s where the signal gets louder than the noise, where taste sharpens, and where the next good thing has space to arrive.

Schedule it. Practice it. Defend it. And when the good idea surfaces, treat it well.

If this resonated, try the 10–10–10 Reset today and tell me what changed.

Sources & further reading

• Erin C. Westgate, Meaning and Attention Components model of boredom; why boredom flags misaligned attention/meaning.

• Sandi Mann & Rebekah Cadman, boring tasks prime creativity (phone book/reading studies).

• Andreas Elpidorou, boredom as a functional regulator that redirects us toward meaningful activity.

• Accessible explainers on using boredom well in modern life.