Word-Of-the-Week #824: Productivity
May 22, 2020 by Susan Clarke
Productivity – abundance or richness in output.
This week features the second half of “BOREDOM MIGHT BE ENGINE OF PRODUCTIVITY” by Michael S. Rosenwald of the Washington Post.
“Mann and van Tilburg, among several other researchers, have in the past decade conducted experiments trying to tease out the potential benefits of boredom. A tricky aspect of conducting such studies is inducing sufficient boredom — far less of a problem during a pandemic.
In van Tilburg’s case, he has conducted experiments in which participants are told to count the number of letters in academic footnotes about imperial Rome. Those who became bored became nostalgic for more productive times in their lives. His boredom studies also showed a tendency for bored people to replace feelings of emptiness with caring acts, such as blood donation.
Mann, in her experiments, has asked study subjects to copy numbers from a telephone book. “Meaningless, boring repetitive, it ticks all the boxes,” she said. Mann then gave a creative task to the bored people and a non-bored control group: come up with as many uses as possible for plastic cups. The bored did better than the non-bored.
While these and other studies show the tantalizing promise of boredom, scholars don’t yet know how bored people, in moments of boredom, choose productive vs. nonproductive paths. The answer might be related to personality type or the setting around them. Scholars are anxious to learn more.
“Boredom isn’t good or bad,” said John Eastwood, who runs the Boredom Lab at York University in Canada and is co-author of “Out of My Skull,” a forthcoming book on boredom. “It’s what we do with that signal.”
That’s a confusing moment, especially amid the pandemic, with news outlets and social media publishing endless lists of things to do with all the newfound time, from the juiciest TV to downloading hours of podcasts — a digital bounty that Newton, thankfully, didn’t encounter.
“When you don’t have a lot going on, you might say, ‘Wow, I’m going to binge watch Netflix. This is perfect,’” Eastwood said. “That will get rid of the feeling in the short term. But treating yourself like an empty vessel to fill with a compelling experience makes you more ripe for boredom down the road.”
Why?
“Because what you’ve done,” Eastwood said, “is you’ve failed to become the author of your own life.”
So what should bored people do?
First of all, children and adults should embrace boredom, the experts say. When the brain is bored, it is magical, finding connections, devising ideas, making plans. Remember why you doodle during meetings. Because you’re bored. The doodles are creative, even if they aren’t pretty.
Another suggestion: Parents shouldn’t create too much structure for their children. If they’re bored, let them be bored. But they also need to create the right conditions for boredom to be meaningful, and that means limiting screen time. (This reporter, who has two children, realizes this will be painful at first.)
“There is literally so much time with absolutely nothing to do,” Mann said. “Their minds should be wondering and wandering. What will they come up with? There’s enormous potential that we risk losing here if we don’t capitalize on it.”
As for Westgate and her new doctoral student, they came up with a survey that they are sending to bored people, asking them how they are spending their time and why and when they chose to do certain activities. If they were bored, how did they deal with it? Did they do something new for the first time?
“This is like one of those party game prompts,” Westgate said. “Like, ‘You’re stuck on a deserted island. What book do you read?’”
Only now, the question is real.
“You’re stuck at home for weeks, possibly months,” she said. “What do you do? That’s what we’re living.”
This week’s focus is on productivity. How often have you felt bored in the last two months? Have you been more creative at times? Did you do something new for the first time?
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