The Modern War on Boredom
For a decade the productivity industry has treated boredom as a bug to be patched, and every app store now sells a faster way to eliminate the empty quarter-second between tasks. Open your phone and you can replace a moment of idling with infinite scroll, and most workplaces have adopted the same logic by filling meeting gaps with dashboards that promise constant engagement.
That logic rests on a simple assumption that feeling uninterested must mean doing nothing useful, which makes boredom seem like wasted time that could be converted into output if we only tried harder to stay stimulated. The assumption feels obvious because boredom is described as an extremely unpleasant and distressing experience in qualitative studies, yet psychologists who study emotion regulation have started to ask whether the unpleasantness itself might serve a function.
Sandi Mann, a senior lecturer in occupational psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, had spent years documenting how boredom relates to stress, accidents, and truancy when she noticed a paradoxical pattern in the literature about daydreaming. When people cannot physically leave a boring situation, attention often shifts inward to memories, images, and unresolved goals, and that inward shift looks suspiciously like the associative search that creativity researchers describe as the engine of new ideas.
What They Actually Did
Two linked experiments tested whether inducing boredom would increase subsequent creative potential. Both were presented at the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology conference in Chester in January 2013 before peer review.
In Study 1, 80 adults recruited opportunistically from a community church near one of the researchers were randomly assigned to either copy telephone numbers from a phone directory for 15 minutes or to go straight to the creative task as a control. Both groups had an even split of gender, all were over 18, and no ages were recorded, which limits demographic analysis but simplified recruitment in a community setting. After the copying period, participants rated how boring they found it on a 5-point Likert scale, and only those scoring 4 or higher continued, with an additional filter that they had to report daydreaming during the boring task to ensure the hypothesized mediator was present.
The creative task was an adapted version of Guilford's Alternative Uses Brick Task, in this case two polystyrene cups, with 3 minutes to list as many different uses as possible. Participants then circled their two most creative uses. Two colleagues of the authors, blind to hypotheses, rated those two answers on a 5-point scale for usefulness and unusualness, averaging the scores after showing high reliability with a mean Kappa of 0.82.
Study 2 expanded the design to 90 new participants who had not taken part in Study 1, again 30 per condition, randomly assigned by time slot to control, written boredom, or reading boredom. The reading condition was added because the authors worried that writing might interfere with daydreaming by demanding continuous motor control and visual refocusing, a concern supported by Andrade's 2010 finding that doodling while bored reduced daydreaming. Participants in the reading condition simply read telephone numbers aloud internally for 15 minutes, a more passive activity that should leave more mental bandwidth for mind wandering.
Three creative tasks followed in fixed order: Task 1 was the same polystyrene cups uses task, Task 2 was a consequences task adapted from Christensen, Merrifield, and Guilford that asked participants to list different consequences of global narcolepsy as a chronic sleep disorder, and Task 3 was a convergent creative problem-solving task of 40 Remote Associates-style word problems where three stimulus words must be linked by a fourth word, such as MEASURE, WORM, VIDEO all combining with TAPE. Each task lasted 3 minutes, participants circled their two most creative answers for the divergent tasks, and blinded raters scored them the same way as in Study 1, while Task 3 was scored simply as number correct.
Being Bored Produced More Ideas
Study 1 produced a clean difference in fluency. The control group averaged 7.33 uses with a standard deviation of 2.01, while the boredom group averaged 10.63 uses with a standard deviation of 4.40, and the independent t-test gave t(78)=4.316, p less than 0.0005, which corresponds to a Cohen's d of approximately 0.97 when calculated from the reported means and standard deviations. The level of creativity of the two most creative answers, however, did not differ significantly between conditions, with control mean 3.58 and boredom mean 3.65, suggesting boredom increased quantity without automatically increasing judged quality in that first design.
Study 2 showed a more robust pattern across tasks. For Task 1, the control mean was 8.03 uses, written boredom 10.03, reading boredom 11.60, with a one-way ANOVA F(2,87)=14.45, p=0.000, eta squared 0.25, and post hoc Bonferroni tests showing both boredom conditions significantly outperformed control while not differing from each other at p=0.062. For Task 2 consequences, means were control 6.73, written 8.70, reading 11.60, F=36.10, p=0.000, eta squared 0.45, with all pairwise comparisons significant except reading versus writing in some reports, indicating a graded effect where passive boredom produced the most ideas.
Task 3, the convergent problems with correct answers, is where the passive boredom advantage became decisive. Control participants solved an average of 6.47 problems, written boredom 6.97, reading boredom 7.10, F(2,87)=4.334, p=0.016, eta squared 0.09, with only reading versus control reaching significance at p=0.019 under Bonferroni correction. Creativity ratings for Task 1 and Task 2 in Study 2 also showed significant effects, with Task 1 creativity F=7.574, p=0.001, eta squared 0.15, and Task 2 creativity F=11.67, p=0.000, eta squared 0.20, both favoring boredom conditions over control.
The authors interpreted this as support for daydreaming as a mediator, arguing that when external stimulation is unsatisfactorily low, attention decouples from the task and moves inward to consider unrelated problems and future goals, which provides a form of incubation that traditional brainstorming research shows benefits divergent thinking. Reading, by demanding less continuous motor control than writing, leaves more room for that decoupled processing, which is why it helped most on the convergent task where remote associates must be found.
A back-of-envelope calculation illustrates why the effect might matter beyond the lab even if small at the individual level. If an average knowledge worker experiences 30 minutes of unavoidable boredom per day across meetings, commutes, and administrative waiting, that is 2.5 hours per week or 125 hours per year. If a 15-minute boredom induction produces a 0.97 standard deviation increase in idea fluency that persists for the next few minutes, and even 10% of that boost transfers to work-relevant ideation, a team of 20 people could generate roughly 6,000 additional candidate ideas per year without extra tools, simply by protecting a short unstructured window before brainstorming.
The Strongest Counterargument
Stated at full strength, the skeptic says this is a small, underpowered pair of studies from a single lab with 80 and 90 participants recruited from a community church, no preregistration, no age reporting, and a design that selects for daydreaming rather than measuring it objectively, and the effect is therefore likely inflated and possibly artifactual. Only participants who rated the task 4 or 5 on a 5-point boredom scale and who said they daydreamed were allowed to continue, which means the boredom condition was filtered for compliance and for the very mediator proposed, while the control condition faced no such filter, creating a selection confound that could explain group differences without any causal role for boredom itself.
The skeptic also notes the sample is WEIRD in the classic sense, the boredom task was created for this study and never validated against established state boredom scales, and the order of tasks in Study 2 was fixed with the convergent task last, so fatigue or practice effects could interact with condition in unknown ways. The creativity measure relies on participants selecting their own two most creative answers, a procedure that Runco and Smith showed people are poor at, and the raters assessed usefulness and unusualness together on a single Likert, conflating two constructs that creativity theory treats as distinct.
Finally, the replication record is genuinely mixed. Gasper and Middlewood in 2014 found boredom increased associative thought in three experiments, which the authors cite as support, but Haager, Kuhbandner, and Pekrun in 2016 and Park, Williams, and Smith in 2019 reported no positive link or even negative correlations between boredom proneness and creative performance, and Larson's 1990 study of emotional predictors of creative writing found boredom negatively predicted quality. Without a preregistered direct replication with objective daydreaming measures and proper control for demand characteristics, the claim that boredom makes us more creative remains suggestive rather than settled.
What We Didn't Prove
We did not prove that boredom makes you more creative in general. The tasks measured divergent thinking fluency and a specific convergent word-problem set for 3 minutes each immediately after a laboratory boredom induction, not real-world creative achievement, artistic quality, or long-term innovation.
We did not measure daydreaming objectively. Self-reported daydreaming was used as an inclusion criterion, not as a continuous mediator, and no thought probes, mind-wandering scales, or physiological indices were collected during the 15-minute induction. The manipulation check was a single-item 5-point boredom rating.
Sample was 80 and 90 adults from a community church, opportunity sampled, with even gender split but no ages, ethnicity, education, or employment status reported. The findings may not generalize to children, older adults, clinical populations, or cultures where telephone directories are unfamiliar.
We did not test dose-response. Fifteen minutes of copying numbers was the only duration, and we do not know whether 5 minutes would be enough or 60 minutes would backfire into frustration and rumination. The telephone directory task is also a very specific form of low-arousal, low-meaning activity, and other boring tasks with different affective tones might produce different results.
Statistical power was modest. Study 1 had 40 per group, Study 2 had 30 per group, and with three tasks and multiple ANOVAs the family-wise error rate was not fully controlled beyond Bonferroni within each task. Effect sizes were moderate to large but based on small samples and should be interpreted with caution.
The Bottom Line
Two experiments found that spending 15 minutes on a boring telephone-directory task increased the number of creative uses people could generate for everyday objects, and that a more passive reading version of the same boring task also improved convergent problem-solving. The pattern fits a daydreaming account where boredom pushes attention inward to search for more interesting mental content, which then carries over into the next task as broader associative activation. The evidence is preliminary and filtered for daydreamers, but it suggests that eliminating every idle moment with a phone may remove a low-cost source of incubation that older workplaces and classrooms provided by default.
What You Can Do
Schedule boredom before you need ideas. If you have a brainstorming session at 10 a.m., block 15 minutes beforehand to do a low-demand, low-stimulation task that you find genuinely boring but not frustrating, such as sorting a junk drawer, copying a list, or reading a dull manual. Do not listen to a podcast or check messages during this window. When you move to the creative task, give yourself 3 minutes of timed free listing without filtering, aiming for quantity first, then circle your two best ideas afterward and develop only those.
Protect passive boredom over active busywork. If you must choose between writing out numbers and reading them, reading leaves more mental room for mind wandering, and the study found it produced more ideas on both divergent and convergent tasks. In practice this means waiting rooms, train rides, and meeting lulls are better left unfilled than filled with email triage if you want the next task to benefit from incubation. Put the phone in another pocket and let the mind drift for a few minutes.
Measure fluency, not just quality, when you evaluate your own creativity. For one week, keep a small notebook and after any unavoidable boring period, set a timer for 3 minutes and list as many different uses for a common object on your desk as you can. Count the number, not whether each use is brilliant. If your count is higher after boring periods than after highly engaged periods, you have a personal signal that boredom functions as a cue to explore, and you can use it intentionally before tasks that reward variety.