Boredom is often perceived negatively by people, as they are conditioned to hate it and try to do anything that can help escape it. But here’s some research suggesting otherwise. Dr. Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire were curious to know the impact of boredom on creativity, so they conducted two studies.
Study 1:
In the first study, they divided 80 people into two random groups A and B of 40 each. People in group A were asked to carry out the boring task of copying numbers out of a telephone directory for 15 minutes and were then asked to complete another task, a creative one, of coming up with different uses for a pair of polystyrene cups.
On the other hand, people in group B were directly asked to come up with uses for the cups, without any prior boring activity. It turned out that the people in group A were able to find more creative uses than those in group B.
Study 2:
In the second study, to see if daydreaming was a factor in this effect, a second boring task of reading contacts for 15 minutes was introduced that allowed even more daydreaming than the boring writing task. A fresh pool of 90 people was now divided into 3 groups A, B, and C of 30 people each.
Group A went from writing to the creative task, group B went from reading to the creative task, and group C directly attempted the creative task. And this time, group B, the one that did the reading task before the creative task, outperformed the other two groups in creativity, while group A still did better than group C.
This validated the observations from Study 1 as well, suggesting that more passive boring activities, like reading some boring content or perhaps attending meetings, can lead to more creativity -- whereas writing, by reducing the scope for daydreaming, reduces the creativity-enhancing effects of boredom.
Dr. Mann says: "Boredom at work has always been seen as something to be eliminated, but perhaps we should be embracing it in order to enhance our creativity.”
How’s your relationship with boredom?