Boredom: Fast track to creativity.

(Reading time: 2 minutes)

We’ve all experienced it – sitting in front of the TV, reading a book or maybe even being at a social event, and then that feeling sneaks up on us: the feeling of restlessness and lack of motivation. Boredom. A state of mind people is actively trying their best to avoid. We’ve actually become so good at it that we felt the need to invent a term for it: “performative workaholism”.

Performative workaholism is the don’t-stop-when-you’re-tired-stop-when-you’re-done attitude that drives especially young people to work until they physically can’t work anymore. They run on crazy schedules, working tirelessly, almost to the breaking point.

This was one of the eye opening topics at Design Matters 2019. Jeannie Huang of Behance by Adobe, talked about being uncomfortable. Being bored. Which has essentially become the same thing, right?

As designers, we expect ourselves to constantly be creative, coming up with groundbreaking designs and creative outputs. But realistically, we can’t be creative all the time. Think about it this way: No system, biological or man-made, is expected to work at 100% capacity, 100% of the time. Huang relates it to the feeling when you’re trying to open up a Photoshop file. It’s taking forever loading and you see your CPU usage running at 100%. You know it’s gonna crash.

When we allow ourselves to occasionally be bored, we prevent our brain from crashing and avoid that burnout feeling when you’ve run out of creativity. Those precious minutes of nothing allow your brain to process all the information you’ve been exposed to during the day, put it into context and reflect on it. Your brain is putting together the pieces of information and inspiration which eventually will birth the creativity that becomes your next product.

Choose to deliberately practice boredom. Choose to filter out the noise, which will help you find value.

Huang suggests 3 practices to help you incorporate boredom into your daily life:

• Schedule in 5 minutes of nothing each day.
  Nothing. No work, no play, no meditation. Nothing. This will break the dopamine cycle, which is continuously fueling our brain through the usage of social media. Did you know that the “pull to refresh” function is designed to release the same amount of dopamine in the brain, as pulling the handle on a slot machine? Your brain has been trained to equate the chance of seeing fresh content, as the chance of hitting the jackpot.

• Try single-tasking for one day a week.
  Force yourself to single-task for an entire day: Don’t answer phone calls in the middle of a conversation, and turn off your notifications when you’re in a meeting. Allow your brain to focus on one task only and don’t fill the empty slots with unnecessary dopamine rushes.

  Also, notice how many pieces of UX/UI in your devices are specifically designed to deliberately take you out of single-tasking. All services are in a constant battle for your undivided attention each day. The time you spend watching Netflix is time you’re not spending on YouTube. And often, we’re watching Netflix while scrolling through social media, right?

• Find empathy and value in waiting times.
  “We talk about user empathy all the time, but you want to experience user empathy? Waiting is empathy” Huang says, pointing out the way we support every age, stage, form or shape in our society by respecting the people who came before us. Find the value in being bored, while being empathetic, waiting in line.

Finally, I want to close off with Huang’s final statements about boredom.

• Boredom trains us to talk about design solutions in terms of the product, not just the experience.

• Boredom trains us to talk about the value we’re bringing to our products, not just the noise.

• Boredom trains us to invest in people, rather than only thinking about investing in ourselves.

• And lastly, but most importantly, we should design products that give people back their time and value.

Watch the full talk with Jeannie Huang below.

Jeannie Huang: The Deliberate Practice of Boredom: Design Matters 2019.