Boredom is a Productivity Superpower

Alright, here’s one of my alltime favorite productivity hacks, and this is probably not one that you consider when you think of productivity. See, I did a video a while back last year that I was really, really psyched on called how to outwork everybody by being bored or something like that. Boredom, I think, is the productivity super hack. It is so powerful. And I got to relive this experience last week when I was traveling down to Phoenix to speak at an event and I spent a couple hours on a plane. And planes are usually a place where I don’t get a lot of work done. I don’t like sitting on my computer working on a plane because all the people behind me I feel like can see my computer screen and I’m weird like that. I don’t like people seeing how I work, maybe because I spend too much time scrolling meaningless social media stuff and I want people to know that I don’t know what it is, but I don’t get a lot done typically on a plane.

This time when I flew out to Phoenix, I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to even listen to podcasts. I wasn’t going to read a book. I was just going to sit and literally stare out the window for 3 hours. I said, my goal is to manifest as much boredom as I possibly can in these next 3 hours and not entertain myself with any external stimuli. No screens, nothing. And it was difficult. I’m not going to lie sitting and not doing anything. I think as a high achieving, peak performing entrepreneur type, you’re always feeling like, I got to go, got to go, got to go.

And there’s more on the to do list that you could be working on. And so anytime you’re not trudging forward, you’re like, I am wasting. I’m not doing anything. But the result of that time that I found is it recharged me in a way and it made me so hungry to work. Whereas a lot of times when I’m working, I kind of have to work up the energy, I have to work up the willpower to sit down and start writing. And when I do, I’m like, oh, let me just kind of ease into this. Let me start with cruising Twitter and a little bit of Instagram and then I’ll kind of walk my way backwards into a writing session, right? Coming off the back of a boredom session, hot damn. I was like, let’s work, let’s do it.
I didn’t need any motivation. I didn’t need to slide my way into it. I was ready to go. And as a result, I pumped out like 1500 words as soon as I got off the plane. I got to my hotel, I wrote 1500 words in the span of 30 minutes for context that would usually take me an hour. And so I was just chugging along, and the work was way more enjoyable. And I think it’s all because boredom. There’s studies, there’s really interesting studies that have been done to show that boredom increases our creativity and it also increases our desire to work.

And the problem is, most of know we have these damn screens and smartphones always within arm’s reach. And so boredom died the day that the Apple iPhone came out, right? Boredom is not really a thing that anybody truly has to experience anymore unless they decide they want to experience it in very few scenarios, right? But it’s so hard to carve out that time and that space for ourselves to say, I’m going to allow some boredom. Like, when was the last time you said, I am just going to sit in my apartment, my home, my backyard for 3 hours and do nothing? No screens, nothing, no book, no podcast, no music, no nothing. Just being a bored little kid, eight years old, in the backyard, and you have to entertain yourself. When is the last time you ever did that? You probably don’t do it very much. And I think boredom is actually an interesting cure, an antidote to so many of modern day’s ailments, so many of them, including overwhelm. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s because you have so much to do and you don’t have any space to think, to breathe. When you feel this lack of clarity and anxiety around where you’re going in life and what you should be working on, it’s because you don’t feel like you have the space to breathe, right? Boredom can solve so many of these things, and yet we don’t make the space for it because it is inherently an uncomfortable state of consciousness.

That’s the really interesting thing about boredom, is that it’s not comfortable to be bored. If you look at it from a biological, evolutionary perspective, the reason that we feel boredom, this itch to go and do something and to change, is so that we are motivated to go and change our circumstances, to improve them, and thus increase our likelihood of passing on our genes and surviving. If we were never bored and never had any motivation to go and change our situation, then we would be content just to sit and eat our bush of berries and nuts and never go and do anything. Never go build, never go explore, never go see what’s just above, beyond the horizon, right? Those things that are so integral to being human would not exist if not for boredom being the stimulation that is pushing us to go do those things. And so boredom is this really interesting concept that I think we would all be better if we could make space for on our day to day basis, if not weekly. Carve out some time for yourself just to say, I’m going to go spend this time doing mean nothing. I’m going to go manifest boredom and see what you get out of it. I think you’ll be surprised.

If nothing else, you’ll come out the other side with a new appreciation for life and all these entertaining things that we have at our disposal. And if nothing else, I think that’s worth its price of admission. So that’s going to do it for me. You beautiful people, I appreciate each and every single one of you for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode.