How To Use Boredom To Be More Productive

Boredom

Empty your cup, then fill it with what matters.

Sergey Faldin

Jul 23 · 3 min read

The first step to do anything is to stop doing everything. To be still.

In a way, boredom is the most productive thing you could do.

Think about it.

There are two types of work you could be doing:

Work from fear. This is anything you do because you should. This is the full-time job you hate. The commitments you regret you’ve made. The stuff other people make you do. Work from fear is often done with the use of discipline, which, in turn, burns energy and leaves you feeling exhausted.

Work from love. This is anything you love doing and would do even if you weren’t paid for it. (In fact, the best way to know what you love doing is to notice what you do when you don’t need to be doing anything. For example, I write.)

When you do something from love, you don’t need to be motivated or compelled. You do things for the sake of doing them, and you enjoy the process.

Any work can be either ‘from love’ or ‘from fear.’

You can write from fear because you’re afraid that you won’t make enough money this month. Or you can write because you enjoy the process, respect the craft.

You can go for a run from fear because you’re afraid you’ll gain weight. Or you can go for a run from love because you enjoy running and want to breathe some fresh air.

Externally, it’s going to look the same. But your attitude, approach, and the feelings that you experience differ. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you achieve, if you didn’t enjoy your life.

Fear is the opposite of love. They cancel each other out. You can’t love when you’re afraid. And vice versa, if you love — the fear ceases to exist. The difference is in the approach.

Imagine a straight line from minus infinity to plus infinity.

Everything on the left side (negative) is where you are when you work from fear. You are on the right-hand side (positive), when you work from love — meaning, you do what you want, and don’t do what you’re supposed to.

When you’re moving in a positive direction — usually, during an emotional or creative recovery, trying to do more of the stuff you love and following your dreams — you’ll inevitably end up in 0.

In mathematics, zero is not the beginning of things, but the middle. It’s what separates the negative from the positive.

In our case, that zero is boredom.

And the important question is:

What do you usually do when you get bored?

The answers will reveal what’s holding you back from doing what you love.

These are the gatekeepers that guard the entry into the world of living from love.

For example, my three ‘coping mechanisms’ with boredom are:

1. Overworking.
2. Binge-eating.
3. Drinking more alcohol than I should.

This is why, whenever I get bored, I do one of the above (or everything at once) — and end up falling back into the negative, fear.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

If you resist the urge to fall back into your old habits — and sit with boredom, feel it, nurture it, embrace it — you’ll finally reconnect with yourself.

You know you’ve managed to enter the world of love when you cancel out boredom not with negative habits (‘coping mechanisms’) but with something you truly enjoy doing. Something that nourishes you.

The writer Neil Gaiman uses this principle in his work. He sits at his desk and tells himself, “Hey Neil, dude; you can either do nothing or write.” After a few minutes of staring at the wall, he starts writing, because it’s more interesting than doing nothing.

This also explains why most blocked writers drink alcohol as a way to fight off the neutral state instead of writing.

To do many great things in life, you first have to enter the state of doing-nothingness and just sit there. Enjoy it. And once you’ve had enough, fill the emptiness with doing what you love.

Written by

Sergey Faldin

Sergey writes about living a meaningful creative life and content creation as a career | Join his free newsletter: https://honestcreative.substack.com/