Can we talk about boredom? (and 'Fresnel' away the most damaging types)

Boredom eats away at people and organisations. It's worth talking about, without shame or blame. I use what I call 'Fresnel thinking' to identify and get rid of the worst types of boredom.

The creeping moss of boredom (my kids are bored with posing for this kind of pic).

i. Philosophy, ideas, and boredom

I get nervous when talk turns to philosophy. People dropping Latin into casual conversation has the same effect - if you did not have that kind of western elite education then you are not part of the club¹.

I’m much better at boring people with the unlikely jobs that I did in my youth. Any fellow newt trappers out there? We’ve got lots to talk about…. it was cold, beautiful, hard graft - never boring.

Ideas that changed me

An easier question to answer is about which thinkers, or ideas, had the greatest influence on my life. I have a semi flippant reply, but it is more or less true².

Was it Peter Singer³? Mary Wollstonecraft? Sócrates⁴ ?

No. I cite Sean Greenaway, the fruit and veg manager in the supermarket⁵ where I worked as a shelf stacker when I was 17. I was on soft drinks and baking (messy, physical work) which was next to fruit and veg (also messy). The mop bucket lived on our aisle and the floor was usually sticky. Eight hours of fetching boxes and stacking shelves was repetitive and dull.

Sean found me standing, hands in pockets and staring into space. He asked what was wrong. ‘I’m bored’. He replied ‘I think only boring people get bored. You should get yourself an inner life, mate’.

Arguably he was channelling American Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1865) but Sean had a strangely profound effect on me - decades later I still think about this ‘sage on aisle 6 (fruit and veg’). I took it on myself to not be bored. Reflecting on boredom also helped motivate me to quit that job. And others later.

Only boring people get bored.

My kids grew up with the same simplistic dictum, a useful trigger to find something interesting to think about or do. They knew to never say ‘I’m bored’. No b-word allowed. Or c-word⁶.

Boredom has excited (if that is the word) thinkers from the Stoics to Einstein and beyond, although the summaries of who thought what about boredom are dominated by men banging on about boredom, rarely women. Perhaps men have more time on their hands. Or less of an inner life.

Boredom research is finally catching up, and accelerated as a consequence of Covid lockdowns. There is an emerging body of context specific boredom research, or at least research that notes important gaps (see this for Africa - also a good summary of the field of boredom).

Is boredom really so bad?

Hell yes! Though moderate levels of boredom may unleash some creative thinking, the negative list is far, far longer and more commonplace. Boredom is not just a feeling of being disengaged - it can affect various aspects of mental health, cognition, and behaviour. It can be both a risk factor and a symptom of depression, can disrupt motivation, reduce pleasure, and interfere with goal-directed behaviour. Boredom can trigger anxious thoughts and worries or exacerbate symptoms of already existing disorders. Boredom can be a factor in alcohol and drug abuse, and increase impulsivity, risky and sensation-seeking activities - to alleviate boredom.

None of this should surprise us, yet talking openly about boredom in the workplace seems to be quite taboo.

Of course, the evidence undermines the first part of the Greenaway’s dictum (‘only boring people get bored’) and risks blaming the individual. Perhaps the inner life part has more value.

Boring research is anything but boring. You may know of the 2014 study⁷ in which participants would rather self administer pain (through electric shocks) than sit alone with their thoughts. Men were much more likely to shock themselves than women. In some of these boredom studies, the duration in which participants were left in an empty room and asked to entertain themselves with their own thoughts was…. 6 to 15 minutes. My favourite line from my quick dive into the literature is this⁸:

A Wisconsin security guard had to call police for help last week because he couldn't break free from his restraints after handcuffing himself because, he said, he was "bored."

Ask yourself: have I ever been so bored in a job (even in the wonderful world of public policy, development, aid, research) that it felt… damaging, even pathological?

My boredom straw poll of friends on whatsapp said ‘Yes!’. Some even gave me live updates of when they were plunging into boredom, and why. I asked ‘is there anything you can do about it?’ and the answer seemed to be no. It would open up too big a can of worms.

ii. Boredom got me in the end

The incantation to protect me from boredom (‘only boring people get bored’) worked well for years⁹.

But boredom plays a long game and got me in the end. I had a job that involved regular two hour management meetings. Agendas were long, low energy, nugatory¹⁰ and rarely related to my priorities or direct responsibilities. Efforts to increase pace, decision making, or delegation were rebuffed with a hard Montell Jordan¹¹ (‘this is how we do it’).

The leadership culture was that slow and long was how we do it. In previous roles I had been encouraged to think about and propose how to do things better - faster, shorter, more energetic, more engaging, explicitly linking dull but important tasks to our intrinsic motivation, happier - but not this time¹².

As a leader I have also tried to keep things interesting and engaging, while recognising that my preferences and motivations are by no means shared by all. Puns aside, I don’t think I was too bad at doing this.

Bored: can ennui-body hear me scream?

My reserves of inner life were already depleted and my boredom became extreme, clanging (literally, extreme boredom felt like a noise in my head), unbearable. I asked myself ‘why are we here?’. More importantly ‘why am I here?’. I escaped.

Do freelancers dream of a boring, secure job?

Boredom gripping those with a full time job contrasts greatly with my experience of freelance consulting. Freelancing is threaded with other woes (anxiety and uncertainty) but for me there is little unmanageable boredom. In moments of inaction my inner life can burst out and… think, write rambling substack posts about boredom. Run a virtual chat club for other freelancers. Go running. Walk the dog. Fiddle with new side hustles¹³.

But it took some time to establish this equilibrium. In my first few months ‘consulting’ (well, seeking work) I would have done (nearly) anything for money. I tried my hand at garden labouring and it was tough, cold and exhausting. Not boring, but nothing like the ‘knowledge gardening’ that I read about on LinkedIn. Who knew?

Then work started trickling in, and I could focus more on the things I wanted to do, not had to do. In time I even said no to a few paid opportunities, including because they looked a bit… boring. I also say yes to giving free advice to people and causes that I like, or interest me¹⁴. Giving away my time to organisations or ideas that I think can change lives or the world for the better, is my half baked (and cheap) nod to another philosopher (Singer’s effective altruism, not Sócrates’s ideological football). Giving away unused work time feels like supermarkets giving away food that is about to go out of date. No-one would have paid for it anyway, but it is still edible.

Consulting has many woes - uncertainty, unpaid gaps, days without a single email or call, no paid holidays or benefits, and dealing with multiple ‘clients’ (good and bad, diligent and otherwise). But rarely boredom. In the moments when freelancing is going really well it is like being in a band that plays only rousing choruses, and no stodgy verses.

A boredom audit

One attraction that freelance consulting does offer is the potential to cut out some dead time, the calendar stacked with obligatory but low value meetings, the admin grind, the stack of ‘cc all’ emails that never get opened but make you feel guilty.

And with this you can eject some of the institutionalised risks of boredom. Those ‘PWJs¹⁵’ who work in organisations and bureaucracies will rightly claim that a lot of the dull stuff is not only essential for delivery but is also the means by which they are held accountable… but I think every organisation and every employee should have the right to question whether specific routines and activities are efficient or fit for purpose. Or simply so dull that the unintended consequence is demotivation that spills over into other parts of the working day or team. Not only boring and useless, but boring and damaging.

Pausing to shamelessly namedrop (important for brand building as a consultant - gives me a whiff of having a power network):

In DFID the former Chief Scientist Chris Whitty¹⁶ justified a major review and reform of DFID’s procedures (the physical ‘blue book’ that was actually a ubiquitous binder) by saying that, over time, every organisation accumulates the barnacles of incremental policy making and procedural tweaks until these are a thick crust that slows everything down, yet are also ignored, misapplied, and not fit for purpose. Bad - and boring, demotivating, - all round. Therefore every few years we need to give the organisation’s hull a damn good scrape.

I found this compelling, and I still picture barnacles when I engage with any organisation’s admin and procedure. Mixed in with the barnacles I see the slime of boredom and the phantom plastic drift nets of inertia. But enough with the nautical metaphors.

iii. Fresh thinking about boredom? Fresnel thinking

OK, just one more, my own mental model for cutting out the dull stuff is a miracle of science that made lighthouses much more effective at stopping boats smashing onto rocks: the Fresnel Lens.

In unscientific language you basically take the bit of a very large lens that actually refracts light - the convex curved surface - and you get rid of the thick glass that this surface sits on. In effect you can slice the curve into small sections and stick these onto a flat surface, and the flattened lens is nearly as good as the thick one.

The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design. A Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens, in some cases taking the form of a flat sheet. This transformed lighthouses by making powerful lenses lighter - and able to be lugged to the top of taller towers and focus beams that could be seen further away.

In my mind, applying ‘Fresnel thinking’ to our working life is trying to identify which bits or mechanisms or functions are most important or effective (refractive), and which are the opposite (merely very heavy thick glass). And within this lump of glass, which bits are boring and useless.

Science meets fake science

As a technical specialist who then tried his hand as a leader I know that this idea could unleash a range of risks - such as prima donna specialists wanting to throw away all of the admin and procedure as boring and useless - or dump it on programme managers. I also firmly believe that a lot of the ‘thick lens’ is actually important but hard to pin down stuff around building relationships, rapport and camaraderie, even joy¹⁷. This is my subjective assessment but in my mind these cultural and behavioural jewels should be argued for and be included in the ‘refractive surface’ of effectiveness, not assumed to be the frivolous and trivial lumpen mass.

Fresnel lenses are a explicitly a compromise between size and quality - a Fresnel lens design allows a substantial reduction in thickness (and thus mass and volume of material) but this as at the expense of reducing the imaging quality of the lens. This is why precise imaging applications such as photography and microscopy still use larger conventional lenses. There is a metaphor here about the risks of going too far in throwing out meetings just because they are boring. But it is probably worth regularly asking questions (to self, to others) such as…

• Is a two hour meeting really necessary? In fact, is this meeting really necessary?

• What is the purpose of this activity? Is there a better / faster / more motivating way of pursuing this?

• Is this thing boring but useful, or boring and useless. Or even worse: boring and damaging.

• How does this relate to our collective mission, and/or the intrinsic motivation that made us choose this career path, field, or organisation in the first place? Can we make this more explicit?

I now realise that I am advocating that we do talk about boredom, and we don’t blame it on the individual - the opposite of what I took from Sean Greenaway.

Categorise your boredom - and tackle the worst kinds

My 2 x 2 matrix (below) tries to examine the boring stuff and categorise it into types- with an action proposed for each. It also also identifies and constrains (but does not snuff out) the interesting stuff that is basically not relevant or useful to an organisation’s mission but helps keep people happy. Perhaps hybrid working makes this stuff particularly valuable when colleagues do meet in person.

• Stop doing things that are boring and useless

• Shift things that are useful but boring, and try and make them more interesting.

• Supercharge things that are both interesting and useful (do lots of this!)

• Squeeze things that are interesting but a bit useless (limit the time used, but don’t kill them).

I think these questions are normal and reasonable challenges to raise at work, not an attack on colleagues or leaders. We should all protect ourselves from boredom - and also protect those we work and live with (see above about mental health and productivity). As I proved myself, sustaining a protective inner life may not work indefinitely. We can collectively make things less destructively boring.

This is about what we talk about and how we talk about it, not just management making ‘space to talk’ which, frankly, can be boring and frustrating if certain types of topic are off the table.

In times like these is talking of boredom a ridiculous folly?

Is it ridiculous to talk about boredom when we are all in a poly-crisis or polytunity (depending on who you speak to) and fighting for much that we hold dear, including our livelihoods, freedoms, and planet?

It might be, but from experience I think too many obviously bad things in public policy, development, government, and aid, are tolerated during (perpetual) crises because ‘now is not the time’ (e.g. women’s visibility and gender equality in post revolutionary Bangladesh; social mobility in end of days DFID). But from experience, the ideal time never comes - so better get boredom on the table now.

End notes

1. In the UK the vast majority (>90%) of people are educated in the type of government schools - comprehensive schools - that do not typically teach Latin, Greek or the philosophy associated with these ancient cultures. I am proud to be part of this 87% - but resent the privileges enjoyed and perpetuated by the privately educated minority who often assume that everyone knows Latin, or cites Homer (the one who did not eat donuts). But that’s for another blog.

2. The formal thinker that changed me was Julian Tudor-Hart, the General Practitioner who theorised the inverse care law. I think about this in my work at least every week.

3. Not Peter Singer, our French Horn playing nextdoor neighbour. The other one.

4. Captain of Brazil’s football team at the 1982 World Cup. Medical doctor, smoker, footballer, activist. “He’s a real doctor! And he smokes at half time!”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B3crates

5. For UK context. Ok it was Waitrose. Mad times. My soft drinks-and-baking boss styled himself on Wham! era George Michael. In two years working there I never once washed my brown nylon overall. It was stiff with fruit juice and icing sugar. In those days the only bottled waters we sold were Perrier and Evian. We ridiculed people that bought something that was ‘free from the tap’.

6. Coldplay.

7. Wilson TD, Reinhard DA, Westgate EC, Gilbert DT, Ellerbeck N, Hahn C, Brown CL, Shaked A. Social psychology. Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind. Science. 2014 Jul 4;345(6192):75-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1250830. PMID: 24994650; PMCID: PMC4330241.

“In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative”.

8. See https://www.foxnews.com/us/wisconsin-bored-security-guard-handcuffs quoted in Ndetei DM, Nyamai P, Mutiso V. Boredom-understanding the emotion and its impact on our lives: an African perspective. Front Sociol. 2023 Jun 29;8:1213190. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1213190. PMID: 37456271; PMCID: PMC10342197. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10342197/#B7

9. I regularly tested my resolve by walking down Boring Road in Patna, Bihar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_Road

10. Nugatory is a favourite word. It was taught to me by an old friend and ex colleague who said ‘until I met X I didn’t understand the meaning of nugatory’.

11. A repeat of my favourite joke.

12. This resistance to change reminded me of a summer working as a road sweeper for my county council in the late 1980s. Working quickly was condemned as treachery by fellow workers and bosses alike, and punished by being put on roadkill collection. The manager told me to never finish a road sweeping round before clocking off time - and ideally find ways of straying into overtime. ‘This is how we do it’.

13. Note to clients: for the consulting part of my work I bill by the hour so no-one gets short changed.

14. But I don’t much like it when well-funded organisations keep coming back for more urgent free advice that in theory may, but actually never does, lead to paid work. They are like me with the free samples of stilton on the counter at the cheese shop. At some point the cheesemonger jabs your hand with a cocktail stick and says a firm ‘no!’.

15. In totally cool underground freelance slang, ‘PWJs’ means People With Jobs. Derogatory and jealousy in equal measures.

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Whitty

17. DFID’s hull underwent more barnacle scraping when obsessing about what the Daily Mail thinks, and ardently pursuing VFM (Value for Money). This removed some silly expenses, but also lopped off quite a bit of low cost joy. And low cost joy helps ameliorate some unavoidable boredom.