Breaking boredom can protect your productivity

Let's face it: sometimes work is just boring. Even if we have the most interesting job in the world, it's likely that there are elements of our work that don't set our hearts alight. One study from 2017 encapsulated a sense of how ubiquitous this experience is, with data from over a million emotion reports indicating that (at least in the U.S.) boredom is more common at work than anywhere else.

When there are deadlines to be met, though, we often try to supress that feeling of boredom to get to the bottom of our to-do list. Sadly, previous research has shown this particular strategy to be "effortful, and often ineffective", leaving us wanting for something more interesting, even as we try to sustain focus.

However, according to new research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, harnessing boredom correctly could help us stay engaged. This work by Casher Belinda and colleagues looks at how boredom shapes our attention and productivity over time, and its findings suggest that if we lean into this internal signal to switch up our tasks, rather than powering through, our productivity may well be spared.

The team's first study looked at the relationship between boredom, mind-wandering, and productivity. Data was taken from a longitudinal study looking at dual-career families and work-family demands; participants were 1,172 employed adults based in the U.S. Over a week, participants responded to eight surveys at random times each day, indicating how bored or excited they were just before the survey started, how important the activity they had been doing was, how much they had been concentrating, and whether or not they felt they had been productive.

As expected, the more bored a participant was, the more likely they were to stop concentrating by the time of the next survey, and the less productive they felt. However, if a task felt meaningful, participants were less likely to stop concentrating, and remained more productive — even if it was dull as proverbial dish water.

How the meaningfulness of a task and boredom influence mind-wandering was therefore the focus of the second study. Participants (206 employed adults, recruited online) were placed into one of two conditions. In the high-boredom condition, the team bored their participants with a video of a man describing different kinds of paint, while those treated to the low-boredom condition watched a footage of a Rube Goldberg machine, with various parts "performed" by world-class athletes.

All participants were then instructed to write a short essay, which they were told would be used to train an algorithm. In the high meaningfulness condition, this algorithm was supposedly to be used to help autistic children learn, while in the low meaningfulness condition, it was said to be for "a separate research project."

Unsurprisingly, the results showed that boredom does indeed lead to reduced productivity, with those who watched the boring video performing less productively in the writing task — participants who were bored incorporated significantly fewer unique words (around −6%) than those in the more engaging condition. They were significantly more likely to report their mind wandering away from the task at hand. The focus of participants who thought their essay was being used for a meaningful purpose, however, remained steady.

This meaningfulness, the authors state, "creates an attentional pull that breaks the link between boredom and future mind-wandering, preventing the effects of boredom from spilling over to inhibit future productivity." In other words, if we find purpose in a task, that meaningfulness breaks the cycle of boredom, and has positive effects on our subsequent ability to stay productive.

The final study incorporated the role of boredom suppression. Participants completed surveys twice during the working day, one survey between 10am and 12pm, and the other between 2pm and 4pm. In them, they indicated how bored they had been in the preceding hours, to what extent they had tried to suppress those feelings. They also shared how meaningless their day's tasks had been, how much their mind had wandered, and how productive they had been.

As expected, those who suppressed their feelings of boredom were more likely to report mind-wandering and less likely to consider themselves productive. Task meaningfulness played the same role as in previous studies, and also seemingly provided a "replenishing effect", mitigating the effects of boredom suppression on future mind-wandering.

Overall, this research demonstrates that sitting with even one episode of boredom can be detrimental to our subsequent productivity throughout the day. As lead author Casher Belinda shared in a statement:

"Like whack-a-mole, downplaying boredom on one task results in attention and productivity deficits that bubble up during subsequent tasks. Paradoxically, then, trying to suppress boredom gives its harmful effects a longer shelf life."

The findings do, however, suggest a better route for dealing with this problem. Although boredom is part of everyday life, and we'll never escape it completely, organising our workload in such a way that more meaningful tasks routinely break the cycle of boredom is likely to help us maintain productivity. While this isn't possible in every role, it certainly offers a practical strategy to those who find swathes of their workload uninspiring and difficult to get through.

Read the paper in full.