August 2024

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New Research Reveals 5 Practical Tips to Make Workplace Boredom Beneficial

Study finds that boredom lingers in the brain and reduces productivity, but there are evidence-based ways to break the cycle and make boredom a catalyst for meaningful, productive work.

How often do you “push through” boring tasks at work? Do you have enough highly meaningful work to mix in with the more mundane tasks to make it all feel worth it?

Recently published research on boredom at work finds that “pushing through” boring work comes at a high cost to future productivity. In the study, suppressing boredom only made it pop up later, in subsequent tasks, like a game of emotional whack-a-mole. But the study also found practical ways to “recover” from boredom – and even use boredom and your response to it as a productivity multiplier.

Emotional intelligence is about being smarter with feelings, and today, let’s explore our options for navigating boredom at work more effectively. 

First, why do we feel bored? Is it normal? Is it helpful?

What’s Boredom trying to tell you?

Boredom is an emotional state characterized by feeling unstimulated, unfocused and restless, yet lacking the desire to engage. When we’re bored, we may also experience physical symptoms like fatigue and a lack of energy. Boredom is an emotion that constantly fluctuates in employees of all ages and occupations, though in many teams and organizations it remains taboo to admit it openly. That’s a shame, because while boredom can be an unpleasant feeling, it can be a catalyst to seek out essential meaning and connection, leading to better performance.

One of our core beliefs at Six Seconds is that there are no “good” or “bad” emotions. All emotions are valuable data that prompt a specific response. They’re messages to ourselves, from ourselves – based on our perceptions of the world around us. Boredom is no different. What’s the message of boredom?

• The potential for this situation isn’t being met. 
• The current situation isn’t aligned with my desires or drives. 
• Make a change to the current situation and seek an alternative. 
• Do something meaningful.

Learn more about Boredom on Plutchik’s Emotions Wheel →

When we listen to boredom and take appropriate action in response, boredom serves its functional purpose and helps us move closer to our goals. “We can’t avoid boredom — it’s an inevitable human emotion,” says Esther Priyadharshini, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia. “We have to accept it as legitimate and find ways it can be harnessed.” 

But still the most common way to deal with boredom is to ignore or suppress it, and that has serious consequences.

Always bored is bad

Like all emotions, when left unchecked, Boredom can become destructive. Chronic boredom studies have shown it can cause depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia and higher turnover. One recent study found a linkage between boredom at work and burnout, as well as decreases in job satisfaction and increased desire to quit. Some amount of boredom is natural and even optimal, but when boredom becomes protracted and we don’t feel we can change it, then it can degrade our mental and physical health and lead to negative outcomes at work. Some research has found it’s the top reason people leave jobs.

That’s why it’s important to find healthy strategies to navigate boredom and mundane tasks – and help your employees do the same. As we’ll see from the research, there are clear ways to do exactly that.

New research: ‘Boredom hangover’ at work

Shimul Melwani is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-author on the recent paper about workplace boredom. Asked in a recent Time interview what surprised her from the study’s findings, she said, “It’s one thing to do worse on the activity that you’re bored of. That’s pretty intuitive. But our research shows it also tends to have this lagging effect where it affects not only the task that you’re working on, but even has an effect on your attention and productivity deficit for a future performance task.”

The participants showed a sort of ‘boredom hangover’, even if they were more interested in the second task. Trying to stifle or suppress boredom and “push through” prolonged its effects. It showed up as a destructive day dreaming later.

But the researchers found one effective cure: doing meaningful work.

“The thing that ended up having the most impact was if the second task was actually something that had meaning for the individuals—having impact on other people, having a connection to other people, where a person really felt like the work they were doing was deeply impactful,” Melwani says. “These tasks were really reorienting, they were replenishing. As a result, it broke that path between the suppression of boredom and the desire to mind wander.”

To combat boredom, mix in meaningful work. 

That is the first of our 5 lessons on navigating workplace boredom effectively, inspired by Melwani & Co’s research: Connect to meaningful work. 

5 evidence-based tips to navigate boredom more effectively

Here are 5 practical tips to be smarter with boredom for optimal results at work.

1. Connect more strongly to the meaning behind your work. As discussed above, participants who connected with other people and with the purpose of their work felt replenished reserves and saw no decline in productivity on future tasks. Exceptional leaders know it’s up to them to make sure employees see and feel the connection between the work they do on a daily basis and the benefits for clients, the organization, and the world as a whole.
2. Break up tedious tasks and days. Don’t spend too much time on any one task, especially boring ones that drain your energy reserves. “Be able to understand and plan your day so that if you know you’re working on something that is going to bring you down,” Melwani says, “follow it up as best as possible with the type of task that is going to affect your emotions and attention in a positive way.” As a professor who derives meaning from meeting with students, Melwani schedules those high impact engagements intentionally throughout her day, interspersed with more boring, exhausting tasks.

3. Dedicate more time to working on passion projects. You know what’s motivating? Choice about how to spend our time! Google is famous for telling employees to spend 20% of their time exploring or working on innovative projects. This breaks up the monotony of other, required work and boosts inspiration.
4. Make boredom less taboo to talk about. Admitting you’re bored or unengaged at work is taboo in many organizations, but it shouldn’t be. Organizations that prioritize emotional intelligence are 22x as likely to be high performing as those who don’t – and a key to that is to normalize talking about feelings and motivation in a real way. Melwani points out that it’s as simple as what managers choose to talk about: “In one-on-ones, managers are often very much focused on task work. Like, ‘Where are you on this project and where are you on this project?’ So little is focused on, ‘What is draining you right now? What is exciting you right now? What’s preventing you from achieving your best right now?’” Send the message: It’s okay to feel bored, or really, to feel anything. It’s about how we respond.
5. Make sure boredom is the right ratio of your work. Everyone has aspects of their jobs they find pedestrian. One could argue it’s optimal to have some amount of boredom. If the boredom is short-term and low-grade, that works. When “pushing through” boring work is the norm, however, that’s when chronic boredom leads to problems.

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