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

by Manoush Zomorodi

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, mobile consumers now spend an average of two hours and fifty-seven minutes each day on mobile devices and about eleven hours a day in front of a screen.

studies suggest that to think original thoughts, we must put a stop to constant stimulation.

It turns out that in the default mode, we’re still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hard-core, focused thinking.

(Smallwood’s tip: “Try to limit the amount of daydreaming you do when you’re operating heavy machinery.”)

As one of my favorite writers, Walter Kirn, explained to me, “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing going on.” Without an interior life in which to blossom, thoughts are flat, unremarkable. Not brilliant in the slightest.

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.

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that records certain experiences in our brain (typically described as pleasurable) and prompts us to repeat them, plays a part not only in sex and drugs, but also the swiping and tapping that we do on our smartphones.

A hundred years ago we were concerned about this new phenomenon of dads sitting at kitchen tables reading newspapers instead of spending time with their wives and children.

The message “Remember to breathe” is Pang’s screen saver. Tech writer Linda Stone coined the term “e-mail apnea,” which she defined as the “temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing e-mail.” You know the feeling: when checking e-mail or waiting for a page to load, often we hold our breath (not to mention keep our shoulders hitched up to our ears). Pang explained that holding one’s breath is an evolutionary signal of anxiety. “It’s what you did a thousand years ago when you thought you were being stalked by a tiger and you needed to be really quiet,” he said. Because of that, holding one’s breath is an “unconscious stressor.”

“From an observer’s perspective, you’re watching a person [and] they’re typing in a Word document. And then, for no apparent reason, they suddenly stop what they’re doing and they shift and look at e-mail or check Facebook. These kinds of self-interruptions happen almost as frequently as people are interrupted from external sources,” Mark said. “So we find that when external interruptions are pretty high in any particular hour, then even if the level of external interruptions wanes [in the next hour], then people self-interrupt.”

when he described the young people who succeed at Radiolab, he said they’re “people who just have a tolerance for that tedium. That’s it.”

In 2013, journalist Alexis Madrigal wrote a piece in The Atlantic describing the flow we get lulled into by technologies that encourage us to keep scrolling rather than actually achieve anything.

Those in charge should value and promote employees’ occasional need for seclusion, even if it just means taking a walk outside for a bit (without checking the phone).

As one teenage boy said, “People don’t see technology as tools anymore. They see them as friends.”

“Technology is this enabler of something,” he said, “but not if we don’t know what the something is.”

“People don’t realize that their discretionary time is actually quite limited,” she said. After sleeping, commuting, eating, and working, Mason estimated they had about four to five hours free every day.

“When technical experts don’t give their full attention in a meeting or a presentation, they may miss nonverbal cues that can help them interpret the impact of their proposals,” she said. “I aspire to have my students become the technical experts who are different from others in the field because they can set down their phones and talk to you.”

“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.”