Creativity through boredom
Everything flows from the rights of the others and my never-ending duty to respect them. ―Emmanuel Lévinas
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: 1 week
🥣 Ingredients: Your smartphone, bored and brilliant challenge podcast
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Digital Consciousness, Discomfortability, Liberatory Learning, Rest
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Challenging, Creativity, Curiosity, Digital detoxing, Digital disconnection, Fun, Play, Slowing down, Stillness, Vulnera-bravery
Creativity through boredom
📝 Description
A week of challenges to detach from your phone and foster creativity.
Do you sometimes have your most creative ideas while folding laundry, washing dishes or doing nothing in particular? It is because when your body goes on autopilot, your brain gets busy forming new neural connections that connect ideas and solve problems. However, our smartphones are preventing us from tapping into our creativity, with their constant notifications and requests for attention. This activity, offered by Manoush Zomorodi, guides you through a week-long challenge to detach from your phone as a way to learn to love being bored and discover the connection between spacing out and creativity.
Find out more about Manoush Zomorodi and the Bored and Brilliant challenge at https://www.wnyc.org/series/bored-and-brilliant. We also encourage you to watch Manoush Zomorodi’s TED Talk on “How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas”.
👣 Steps
Day 1 – In your pocket
For today, when you are on the train, bus, sidewalk, or passenger seat, keep your phone in your pocket. Or — bonus points — in your bag. Listen to Day 1 podcast here.
Day 2 – Photo free day
For today, see the world through your eyes, not your screen. Take absolutely no pictures today. Not of your lunch, not of your children, not of your cubicle mate, not of the beautiful sunset. No picture messages. No cat pics. Listen to Day 2 podcast here.
Day 3 – Delete that app
There is always one app — that one damn app — that steals away too much time. So, today, delete it. Delete that app. Think about which app you use too much, one that is the bad kind of phone time. You pick what that means. Delete said time-wasting, bad habit app. Uninstall it. Listen to Day 3 podcast here.
Day 4 – Take a Fauxcation
Today, you are getting a break from email, texting, social media, or whatever means of digital communication interrupts you all day long. It is a fauxcation (or fake-cation if you prefer). So, set an email auto-reply just as you would do if you were out for a real vacation, send an “I will be back later” text out on group chat, or put up any away message status on social media. Listen to Day 4 podcast here.
Day 5 – One small observation
Social networks help us stay connected. We love social media. But how often do we swipe past strangers’ selfies, baby pictures, and career updates in lieu of the actual humans around us? Today, go somewhere public. It could be a park, a mall, the gas station, the hallway at work or school. You pick. Once you get there, hang out. Watch people, or objects, or anything that strikes you. Try not to be (too) creepy. Imagine what a single person is thinking, or zoom in on an uninventable detail. Just make one small observation you might have missed if your nose were glued to a screen. Listen to Day 5 podcast here.
Days 6-7 – Dream house
We want you to get really bored, and then make something creative, introspective, and personal. Your instructions for today are multi-part:
- Put away your phone.
- Put a generous pot of water on the stove and watch it come to a boil. (If you don’t have a stove or a pot, find a small piece of paper and write “1, 0, 1, 0” as small as you can until it is full.) Either way, you should get bored. Keep it up as long as it takes to daydream.
- Next, take out your wallet and empty it of all its contents. Use them to construct your dream house. It could be the place you wish you lived in all the time or a getaway. Take as long as you need to build.
- Give your house a descriptive name.
- When you are finished, and only then, go get your phone. Take a picture of the house (careful with your credit card numbers!).
- Email your picture to bored@wnyc.org and tell them about your creation (put its name and location in the subject line and tell them why it is your dream house in the body).
- Listen to Days 6-7 podcast here.