π€ When Boredom is a Superpower
Reading time: 978 words in approx 5 minutes
I live in a world where novelty (and its accompanying buzz) is only a click, tap, or voice command away.
It’s easier to find novel stimuli instead of “suffering” through boredom. But boredom is the soil in which grows imagination, creativity, play, and inspiration. There is beauty in boredom.
Nobody wants to be bored
My partner walked into the room earlier today and announced: “Manil, I’m bored”.
We’re dealing with a much more limited set of activities this year, but nobody wants to be bored. I’ve rewired my brain through years of internet-attached behaviour, where I now default to seeking novelty. When boredom is imminent, I hit CTRL+T
and type whatever first comes to mind that will make the search engine give me stimulus.
When I let boredom work against me
Boredom is a lack of stimulus. For the most part, we are thinking meatbags that find a lack of stimulus unpleasant. But boredom can hit me when I am too frustrated by my task. In other words, my aversion to boredom can, and does, often block my attempts to enter Flow.
Flow is a middle ground. It lies between the feeling of achievement when pushing against the current limits of my abilities, and, the feeling of frustration with a task that is too far beyond my current abilities.
On the other hand, when I learn to embrace boredom, I acquire a competitive advantage in thinking my way past problems, learning faster, and thriving in a distracted world.
How to get heavy shit done by embracing boredom
I see people strategically substitute computers with analog tools (like, pen and paper) to encourage deep work. That helps some folks, but it doesn’t help me. For better or worse, computers are my default tools. But I do think that these machines can be made to empower my attempts at deep work.
I’ll use the remaining half of this post to walk through my opening strategy at leveraging boredom to become more productive. I needed to unlearn novelty-seeking behaviour. I decided to focus my efforts on distractions which take hold when I am doing deep work. These distractions were often well-intentioned research which turned into rabbit holes of unrelated actions. I found that my novelty-seeking is most often unconscious. So I was looking for a way to interrupt an unconscious action.
I searched for browser add-ons that would let me whitelist the URLs that I absolutely needed for deep work (for example, calendar.google.com, trello.com) while automatically preventing the brief satisfaction (and illusion of productivity) had from seeing information populate a page.
I found LeechBlock NG, a Firefox Recommended add-on. It’s important that the extension be trustworthy because the browser permissions needed for functionality that blocks URLs are possibly dangerous.
First I went to Options and made list initial set of URLs.
The *.*
tells LeechBlock to block any site with any domain. Attempts to open google.com
and duckduckgo.com
will be stopped, as will manil.xyz
and manil.space
.
The +
before a URL tells LeechBlock that this is a URL to be Allowed. I’ve whitelisted my calendar, my task management tool, and the web programmer’s equivalent of the DSM 5. It’s our primary source of reference and I think, if I find myself going down a rabbit hole in MDN, it can only be good for me ;-)
Then I told LeechBlock the times when I wanted these rules to be active.
I set it to be active all-day, everyday.
But I need to give myself windows when distractions are OK. After all, I do need time to move around information and triage my email at some point in a workday. So I allowed this whitelist to be disabled, with an Override.
Then went into the General tab, and set the length of Overrides to be 25 minutes.
This lets me activate Overrides for windows of 25 minutes, so I can do shallow work.
Cal Newport’s Deep Work tells me that, with limited amounts of time available for unfettered access to the internet, I am unlikely to use too much of it for purposes other than my shortlist of shallow work. I believe it.
The initial set of URLs in the whitelist was too restrictive, but I chose to grow it with deliberation instead of guessing what I needed ahead of time, to avoid being too liberal with my definition of what was necessary.
After some time, my whitelist now looks like this:
What Calm looks like now π§π½ββοΈ
Today, after coffee and light cleaning, I started my workday by writing in a journal. The journal is meant to be an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness reproduction of my thoughts. I was startled to see how frequently the configuration I set earlier interrupted my near-unconscious action of searching for contextual information οΌ that gateway to unchecked distractions.
After I had written…
Today I swept and mopped the floor while listening to the Life Aquatic soundtrack.
…I quickly followed up with:
One could make the argument that this search was necessary for my writing. But I didn’t need the search. Instead, I found myself mulling over my thoughts instead of seeking novel information. Eventually I was able to, without the help of the internet, find a good resolution to the “missing” information that prompted the attempt to do a web search.
Later, I stared at a lamp for a few minutes. At the end of those minutes, I had the perfect bit of code to make a PUT request for a database entry!
The code didn’t work. But that’s OK.
Check out a previous post about restoring my ability to focus!
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