The pandemic has forced many of us to reflect on our lifestyles - both at home and at work. As several countries start to reopen, people are navigating social and work interactions. Employers are offering greater flexibility to work remotely at least some of the time, or even on a permanent basis.
It is wonderful that we are thinking more carefully about where and how we work. But a recent Economist article urges us to go even further and pay attention to what actually constitutes work. Should sitting in meetings and responding to emails be considered work? Undoubtedly both are a necessary part of modern work. But we are all guilty of booking too many meetings and sending too many emails.
It is important to challenge these kinds of habitual behaviours. Can the content of an email be handled through a group chat or people collaborating in a shared document? Can a meeting be 15 minutes forcing all parties to get to the point? Changing these behaviours also creates time for two very important elements of life -first, deep work and second, boredom.
We all understand the significance of deep work which requires thought, planning and creativity. It also requires large blocks of time for our minds to think freely, expansively or in great detail to produce something of quality - be it a piece of writing, a work of art, or an impactful speech.
Boredom, which is perhaps the opposite of deep work, is sadly less valued but equally important. It is a state where we are not mentally engaged in a specific activity, where the brain can rest and activate its 'default mode network'. This network allows our imagination to flourish in an unstructured way, our ideas to percolate and our brains to synthesize information. It also allows us to do what's called 'autobiographical planning' - reflecting on what we have learned in the past and imagining our future.
Most of us tend to pack our days with tasks leaving little buffer room in between. This makes us too drained to do important deep work and no time to be bored at all. What's more, we often confuse boredom with leisure - such as hobbies or going on vacation. True boredom comes from being still and letting our mind wander. Or giving our minds room to work peacefully in the background as we are doing routine physical tasks like folding laundry, going for a walk or enjoying a coffee alone on a patio. The ideas that occur to us during true boredom can in turn feed our deep work, not to mention our relationships and emotional life, creating a virtuous cycle.
In our device-rich, 'doing' obsessed culture, it is easy to be distracted, to resist boredom. A recent study is quite telling, as physicist Derek Muller points out. People were instructed to sit alone in a room with the only form of distraction being a buzzer which, if pressed, would administer a mild shock to their bodies. Most of the study participants surprised themselves by becoming so uncomfortable after a few minutes of boredom that they chose to hit the shock button! But rather than seeing boredom as a discomfort, a waste of time, an enemy, what if we could reframe it as an investment similar to sleep, exercise and a healthy diet?
The opportunity cost of not letting ourselves be bored is high, according to a recent TedTalk by journalist Manoush Zomorodi. In partnership with leading researchers, she undertook a study called "Bored and Brilliant - The Lost Art of Spacing Out' with 20,000 participants to examine cell phone habits and the detrimental effects of not giving our brains any down time. Her findings show that by robbing ourselves of boredom, we inhibit neural connections that help us connect
