"Boredom is a waste of time"

Even granting that boredom has a job, there's a belief that a bored minute is an empty one. Nothing happens in it. It's time subtracted from the day.

Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, in 2014, ran two studies in which people were given something boring to do, copying numbers from a phone directory or reading them, and then a creative task, coming up with uses for a pair of cups. People who'd done the boring task first produced more ideas than people who hadn't. In the second study, the boring reading task did more for some kinds of creative work than the boring writing task, and the researchers suggested that daydreaming, which reading allows more of, might be the link. These were small studies, eighty and ninety people, with paper cups, and I'd hold the numbers lightly. But the direction fits Baird's incubation finding from chapter 5. An undemanding stretch, in which the mind is free to wander because the task doesn't need it, is where new ideas come from.

That's the opposite of empty. A bored minute is a minute in which the mind, having nothing to attend to outside, attends to the inside, and the inside is where the half-formed things are. The solution to the problem at work. The realisation about what you actually want to do about the house. The sentence for the difficult email. Those don't arrive during a podcast, because during a podcast the mind is attending to the podcast. They arrive in the shower, on the walk, in the queue, in exactly the minutes the fill has taken, and people who've filled every minute for years say they've stopped having ideas, and wonder whether they've got older, and the answer is that they've got fuller.

There's a version of this in every trade. The writer who solves the chapter while washing up. The engineer who sees the fault in the car park. The parent who works out what's wrong with the child on the drive home with the radio off. None of them were working. They were bored, briefly, and the bored minute did what the desk couldn't.

So a bored minute isn't a waste. It's the only kind of minute in which some things can happen, and a day with none in it is a day in which those things didn't, and you'll have noticed the absence as a vague sense of not thinking as well as you used to, and put it down to something else.