Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything

by Manoush Zomorodi

Guess who is the person who actually interrupts you the most? Yourself. Mark’s lab has a term for this—the “pattern of self-interruption.”

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.

As part of this movement, which he calls Time Well Spent, he holds small designer meet-ups to share best practices, new forms of incentives, and products that “measure success in their net positive contribution to people’s lives.”

In 2007, Couchsurfing, a precursor site to Airbnb, where people could find places to stay for free all over the world, measured success in the “net positive hours that were created between two people’s lives.” The site used data such as how much time the couchsurfer and the host spent together and how positive the experience was (i.e., “Did you have a good time together?”). By Couchsurfing’s calculus, the time two people initially spent searching profiles, sending messages, and setting up a stay on the Web site was factored as a negative, because “they didn’t view that as a contribution to people’s lives.” That time was therefore subtracted from the original gains. “What you’re left with is net positive hours that wouldn’t exist if Couchsurfing didn’t exist.”

We should imagine a world where success is aligned with the fulfillment of the user’s original goals. Did you relax, feel connected to faraway friends, discover a new way to decorate your kitchen? The metric by which sites and apps should be rewarded, Harris argues, should revolve around the answer to this question: “Whatever people were looking for, did they get it?”

That’s up against a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen, whose daily job is to break that and keep you scrolling on the infinite feed.”

McGonigal found the same conflicting information while researching her book SuperBetter, which included a meta-analysis of almost five hundred peer-reviewed studies on how game play affects real-life wellness (physical, emotional, social, professional, and academic). Half of them found that video games led to depression, social isolation, poor grades, and drug use, while the other half found the exact opposite, linking frequent video game play to greater happiness, stronger relationships, less drug use, better grades in school, and so on.

The idea is to play video games for “short bursts” in order to elevate one’s mood and level of physical energy and then get “back to your everyday life in a more positive state.”

Playing for specific increments of time limits overplaying and avoidance of real life and has also been linked to different effects on the brain.

Self-regulation is not only key to accessing the benefits of video games, it is also another form of positive reinforcement.

If we have to get tough about setting time limits, another important way to use video games healthfully is not to berate ourselves for the time we decide to spend playing them.

The only problem with an “addicted” brain is that it’s fallen into a rut of seeking those pleasures from only one particular, often detrimental, stimulus.

One person’s incredible waste of time is another’s wonderful tool for improving mood and mind.

“But if you were an alcohol distiller, you could throw up your hands and say, ‘It’s not our problem. How do we know who is abusing our product?’ Today these companies know. Two Dots, Candy Crush, Facebook, and Twitter all know exactly how much you’re using their products. “Maybe,” Eyal said, “it’s the upside of collecting all this data about us.”

As to what games McGonigal recommends for kids, she said, “Any game that requires you to study it to understand its rules, opportunities, and resources. Any game that is genuinely challenging.”

The key, however, is to play with real people whom you know and with whom you have a real connection—even if they are across the country. As McGonigal explained, “We don’t see those benefits in the first-person shooter world when you are mostly playing against people you don’t know in the anonymous Internet game play.” That’s because there is a negative effect associated with playing violent games when the opponent is anonymous.

“When you don’t know the other person, you don’t have any social consequences for beating or defeating them, being a poor sport when you win.” This can also lead to players’ becoming increasingly aggressive and less kind to those they perceive as weaker.

McGonigal calls this phenomenon “testosterone poisoning,” a terrifying concept. But she has a simple and direct prescription for the malady. “If you love these games, you need to spend at least half of your time or more playing with people you know.”

after completing this challenge, other Bored and Brilliant participants say they now do weekly or monthly fasts from certain apps. Like Aaron, who struggled to delete Twitter, then figured out that he didn’t have to give it up forever. “I could just stop using it for a day. It ended up being a lot easier than I thought, so I’ve decided to go ahead and do it every week,” he said about his No-Twitter Mondays.

Krentz and his fellow BCG upper-management colleagues discovered that perpetual connectivity was good in the short term—not so much in the long term. Simply put, these consultants were totally cracked out.

“What we found was that while we attracted people with great talent who were excited to join BCG, we were also losing them three, four, five years later, when they found the life unsustainable,” Krentz said. The company had a serious retention problem.

if we want to do anything more interesting and important than just answering e-mails and IMs, it seems a separation is necessary. “The problem is not technology, it’s with how we’re using it,” Mason said. “We’re at a place where technology is consuming our limited mindshare instead of giving us the mental space to have brilliant thoughts.”

is the digital environment—the very thing enabling greater knowledge and connectivity around the globe—actually stunting our capacity to thrive in it?

Artists have always understood that solitude—boredom, even—is essential to the creative process.

Some of their ideas include giving people more freedom to work offsite, especially when they are assigned projects that require creativity. Who doesn’t get more work done at home or at a café when they really need to concentrate? Still, Kaufman and Gregoire suggest that managers put aside a room designated for quiet work only. Their biggest recommendation, however, is more a change of mind-set than architectural configuration. 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).

In 2012, Volkswagen made the bold move of shutting down its BlackBerry servers so that they stop routing e-mails thirty minutes after the end of employee shifts. The servers start cranking again thirty minutes before their shifts begin. The effort (which does not apply to senior management) was explicitly put into place to draw a line between work and home.

The automotive company Daimler allows employees to automatically delete any e-mails that come into their in-box while they are on vacation.

Happiness and success at all ages are conflated with being popular, outgoing, confident in a strong-handshake-and-forceful-voice kind of way. Social, Cain believes, is defined in a “narrow and oppressive way.”

in most contemporary places of work, the quiet person can often be dubbed weird or egocentric. That’s especially true in the recent cult of collaboration arising out of such partnerships as Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. “There have been so many amazing creations and inventions that have come from ‘collaboration’ that there’s now a mythic status around the very word,” Cain said.

To truly take control of our bored time in a business setting, we can’t feel guilty about it. While action—or inaction, as it were—might look lazy or strange to others—if the results are top-quality work, nobody should shame you. So the responsibility lies within us and not our bosses—or our smartphones.

“Until recently, we have tended to think that the solutions for tech overload must be technological in nature,” Cain said. “But really, the solutions are emotional and psychological. At their core, they have to do with self-awareness.”

“Hello! I’m focusing in on a project right now, but I’m planning to check all my e-mails at 4 P.M. today. If it’s urgent, contact me with a real, old-fashioned phone call.” “Preparing the next generation to take over the world! I’m on a digital hiatus to spend a little more time with my family.” “Consciously uncoupling from my phone for the day.” “Teched out, checked out. Taking a little break from the devices. Thanks for your patience.”

tracking included their social multitasking—such as what kinds of social media the kids used and how many other ways they were interacting while they were doing things like their homework. Two years later, she and her team did a series of tasks with the group. The kids were asked to imagine solutions to world problems, react to real-life stories, and predict where they would be in their lives a year from now and ten years from now. Although her findings are preliminary, Immordino-Yang reported a “very intriguing correlation that kids who were more engaged and multitasking with social media were actually less empathic in their reactions to other people. They also are less imaginative two years later about their own possible future and about solutions to world problems, like violence in their neighborhood for example.”

Returning to the moment when audience members have to give away their watches and phones, she said, “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.”

Embracing boredom requires us to make choices about how we spend our time. And in order not to fall right back into filling a day up or downright wasting it, we need to give ourselves permission to say no to the cult of busyness.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, even though I’m a professional futurist,” King said. “But I have been keeping notebooks for my entire life, and I write down what I see.”

He breaks the process down into three basic steps, the first of which is “to create space in our lives to figure out what is essential.” Step two is to “eliminate all the nonessential activities.” The third and last is to reallocate the resources that have been freed up and invest them in pursuing those things we’ve decided matter most to us.

So far technology is the greatest distraction of all time, which is precisely why McKeown argues we have to increase our awareness of and ability to make choices about how we use it. “Technology is this enabler of something,” he said, “but not if we don’t know what the something is.”

McKeown realizes turning to essentialism is a “big shift in mind-set” for most of us. But he insists that “almost everything is nonessential and a few things are incredibly valuable.

The thrust of essentialism is giving yourself the time and space to figure out what’s important to you and then consistently checking in with yourself to make sure you take the steps to achieve your original goals.

In order to consume information, you need to pay attention, or as Tan put it, “The currency of information is attention.” An overabundance of information, through a mindless consumption of all that junk information, will lead to a poverty of attention.

Bored and Brilliant is about living smarter and better within a digital world. Technology isn’t going anywhere, and who would want it to?

What I’m advocating is balancing the way we use technology and making sure, as best we can, that our gadgets align with what we hold dear and true.