Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

by Manoush Zomorodi

“In a very deep way, there’s a close link between originality and creativity and the spontaneous thoughts we generate when our minds are idle.” In other words, you have to let yourself be bored to be brilliant.

Golden Krishna, an expert in user experience who currently works on design strategy at Google, astutely pointed out during one of our conversations that the only people who refer to their customers as “users” are drug dealers—and technologists.

“It’s up to us to figure out how and where we want to share our attention,” he said. “Through research on neuroplasticity, we know that the brain is responsive in that it changes based on the behaviors we adopt, and knowing that is power.”

In a study from 2014 called The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices, researchers at Virginia Tech found that the mere presence of a mobile device, even just lying there, seemingly benign on the kitchen counter, can lower the empathy exchanged between two friends. In a “naturalistic field experiment,” one hundred pairs of people were assigned a ten-minute conversation and then observed from a distance. If people happened to have a mobile device in their hands or on the table, they were not told to put the phones away. And guess what? “It was found that conversations in the absence of mobile communication technologies were rated as significantly superior compared with those in the presence of a mobile device, above and beyond the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and mood,” the study noted. “People who had conversations in the absence of mobile devices reported higher levels of empathetic concern. Participants conversing in the presence of a mobile device who also had a close relationship with each other reported lower levels of empathy compared with pairs who were less friendly with each other.”

I see this tendency in the young radio producers I work with. They look freaked out when I suggest they call a source who hasn’t responded to multiple e-mailed requests. They don’t know how to do “good phone”—use their voice rather than the crafted written word to convince or cajole.

What’s wrong with conversation? One eighteen-year-old reflected what many others felt when she said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation, it takes place in real time, and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” Turkle was dumbfounded. That’s exactly what she thought was right with conversation. “What’s with us that we’ve gotten afraid of revealing ourselves to each other in the spontaneity of face-to-face talk?” she asked. Texting and messaging afford us the ability to edit ourselves and present what we imagine is a more “perfect” version of ourselves, Turkle explained.

An entire subset of this Zenware strips down computer programs to their barest utility (think no pull-down menus) so you can “confront the existential terror of the blank page rather than spend most of your time playing around with formatting and macros and doing all the other things that you can do with complicated programs that feel like work but really aren’t that productive.”

“Why is it that you think that technologies are any more distracting than your own mind or anything else in the world?” Distraction doesn’t come from devices or people or things, they posited. It is an internal problem.

Heady stuff. For now, however, the pictures filling the cloud are mainly from people documenting every angle of themselves and their lives. I mean, come on, those vacation sunsets, children on their first day of school, and farm-to-table entrées aren’t going to take pictures of themselves! It can be hard to parse the line between capturing and holding dear a fleeting impression of precious life and immediately jumping mentally ahead to what people are going to think when they see your amazing photo. Your daughter is gorgeous. Your peaches and cream look like they came right out of Real Simple. Your taste is exquisite; your life is sublime. Right? As gratifying (or soul-destroying) as crafting an idealized narrative of oneself on social media can be, let’s not dismiss the time-suck aspect. In her research, Sherry Turkle came across a common theme that can be exemplified by the story of one father. This well-intentioned dad signed up for a school field trip in an effort to get closer to his daughter, but he wound up spending the entire trip, starting with the bus ride, taking pictures, posting them to Facebook, and, naturally, tracking his likes—that is, until his daughter pointed out that he hadn’t spoken to her in over an hour.

“We’re constantly going from one thing to the next to the next.” Instead of outsourcing so we can focus our attention on more important tasks, “we have this constant stream of what’s next, what’s next, what’s next and never fully embrace any of the experiences we’re having.”

In other words, if you’ve had a hectic morning dealing with lots of e-mail and people stopping by your desk, you are more likely to start interrupting yourself. Interruptions are self-perpetuating.

The same two regions of the brain that are chronically understimulated when we’re depressed are chronically hyperstimulated when we play video games.

“No parents in history have ever had to cope with the unprecedented convergence of ubiquitous, sophisticated, alluring, habit-forming screen technology and unfettered, unregulated advertising,” she said. “That combination is the major problem.”

We always like to do things that we like but, because of that, we never change. In unknown territory and in things you don’t like, things you fear—that is where you get change. —Marina Abramović

“You think that you are disconnected. But the question is, what are you disconnected from? You’re actually constantly disconnected from yourself by having all of these things.”

Epictetus: “If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.”