The Importance of Being Idle

I often have my best ideas when my iPhone battery has run out, or I'm going for a walk, or waiting on a platform for a delayed train (a familiar event in England). It's like when I was a kid at school; I'd be at my most imaginative when I was at my most bored, typically staring out of a classroom window, wondering why the hands of the clock on the wall were moving so slowly. Monotony seemed to be a good spur for inspiration. 

The power of boredom

If you need a creative breakthrough on your latest project, why not try hanging up your mobile phone for a bit? You won’t find inspiration at the bottom of the never-ending scroll. Quit doing something and start doing nothing. The key to unlocking your imagination might be an extended dose of tedium. Ingenious minds, from Shakespeare to David Ogilvy, all put their faith in the power of boredom. 

The challenge lies not in discovering new sources of inspiration but in filtering the overabundance of distractions and stimuli. The film director and artist David Lynch described the process of catching original ideas as a bit like fishing.  There's a lot of waiting around, when it looks like nothing is happening, then suddenly you’ve caught something!

“Ideas are like fish. You catch the fish." You have to convince them to come to you. Lynch said that having the desire for an idea is like sitting with a baited hook to see what will bite.” David Lynch

Busy time, shouldn’t be all the time

Sure, keeping busy has its benefits, and sometimes, it's good to be distracted. It can pull us out of obsessing over our problems. However, while running is good for our mental and physical health, we don't suggest doing it every waking hour. Likewise, a carousel of infinite distractions can make us imaginatively overstimulated and mentally exhausted. After a long run, your personal trainer or fitness app recommends a rest period. Your brain and imagination need it too. 

The Benefits of Boredom

So, perhaps we should turn off the faucet of social media streams that clammer for our attention and give ourselves a boredom break. Go for a walk, stand in a church, or just sit on a bench and watch the world go by. 

In a world where a universe of distractions is available at the touch of a button, just sitting down and doing nothing seems bizarre, but you need to be bored sometimes.

If you don't take it from me, listen to Shakespeare, who, according to Donald Campbell, put his feet up between writing Hamlet and the Merry Wives of Windsor.

“Shakespeare was idle between plays... I'm not comparing myself to Shakespeare but people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative” Donald Campbell 

Artists, Advertising copywriters, novelists and directors like Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo Davinci, all believed in the benefits of procrastination, boredom, and laziness. The legendary Ad-man David Ogilvy writes about how he postpones the writing of an ad for as long as possible until there is nothing to do but write it 'at this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy so I go home and sit at my desk. [] if all else fails I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone' (this was the 1950s, this shouldn't be taken as writing advice). 

The great English writer Doctor Samuel Johnson was a great defender of idleness. He was most famous for compiling one of the first dictionaries of the English language and coining some of the most memorable phrases such as “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” or '“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Despite what appears to be a very productive and creative life, Johnson also wrote a book of poems and essays extolling the benefits of laziness called ‘The Idler’.

“Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.” Samuel Johnson

It’s about letting boredom open up the space in your mind to allow it to notice things and catch those bright unexpected sparks that lead us to a great new idea.

Reclaim our brains

If we are going to reclaim our brains from algorithms and distraction machines, we need to be more deliberate about devising strategies for allowing ourselves to be bored. Donald Campbell talks about the power of 'mental meandering' and cutting ourselves off from distractions and outside stimulation: "One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or if driving, not to have the car radio on…Mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process. If you are allowing that mentation to be driven by the radio or the television or other people's conversations, you are just cutting down on your exploratory, your intellectual exploratory time."

We should use technology to free us from distractions, not enslave us. Block out times to focus on one thing. Go for a walk. Leave your mobile phone in another room or set a time limit on apps or more radically delete your most used apps.

Give yourself a boredom break, or take some time to mentally meander. That space might allow you to sneak up on a puzzle or creative problem and solve it.