Boredom is not wasted time

Something I keep coming back to is the importance of focus and our ability to fight distractions.

Christopher Nolan, one of the greatest filmmakers, said:

My personal choice is about how involved I get. It’s about the level of distraction. If I’m generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all day wouldn’t be very useful for me. I’m easily distractible so I don’t really want to have access to the internet every time when I’m bored. I do a lot of my best thinking in those kind of in-between moments that people now fill with online activity, so it benefits me.

I think part of the problem we might face here is how we treat boredom these days. With smartphones and social media at our fingertips, we are never bored. But boredom is not wasted time. It is a really important mental reset. This state allows the mind to wander, connecting past memories to future possibilities. This is where we can generate creativity, deep problem-solving, and self-reflection from.

I myself struggle with managing boredom. I avoid it as much as possible to the extent I check on my phone and apps very often even when watching a movie or talking to my friends. This feels like something most probably stopping me from being more creative and productive. I’m asking myself, what if I could learn how to navigate boredom? What if I just try to test this theory for real? This is a so much nuanced thing to think about but what if this would appear as a game changer?