Don’t Tell Your Boss, Boredom is Good for Your Creativity

Were one of those people when you were in school that the teachers would call out for staring into space? Or you were bored at work, when the boss said "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean"? Shreveport-Bossier, I am here to tell you, being bored is good for you.

The reason it is so good is that you can daydream, which means your brain is working well. According to US News and World Reports,a study was done with 40 volunteers who were asked to copy numbers from a telephone directory for 15 minutes. (yes, a boring task), They were then asked to come up with different uses for a pair of Styrofoam cups. Believe it or not, the bored people came up with more and better uses for the cups that people who were not bored.

In another study, 30 people spent 15 minutes copying telephone numbers while another 30 people just read telephone numbers. The people who just read the numbers were more creative in the cup task than those who wrote the numbers, the investigators found.

So the next time you are in a boring meeting, pay attention to if you are called on, but be happy that you are bored. Chances are when you are done with the meeting your creativity will be higher than normal.

"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," study author Sandi Mann, of the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, said in a society news release.

"What we want to do next is to see what the practical implications of this finding are," Mann said. "Do people who are bored at work become more creative in other areas of their work -- or do they go home and write novels?"

So now you can tell you boss that if you looked bored, he/she should be happy about it, you are about to be creative.