There is a version of the productive entrepreneur that entrepreneurial culture celebrates: fully scheduled, always on, every hour allocated, zero idle time. The research on creative output suggests this profile is not optimally productive. It is optimally occupied — which turns out to be a different thing entirely, and often the opposite.

What boredom actually does

Gasper and Middlewood’s three experiments tested how different emotional states affect associative thinking by inducing four distinct conditions: elation, relaxation, boredom, and distress. The finding that emerged was counterintuitive in a precise way. What determined creative performance was not whether the state was positive or negative — it was the motivational orientation the state produced. Elation and boredom, despite being opposite in valence, both produced approach-oriented motivation: the desire to seek out new experiences, novelty, and stimulation. Both produced equivalent levels of associative and novel thought, significantly outperforming distress and relaxation.

The mechanism is the approach orientation that boredom generates. A bored mind is a mind looking for something more interesting — and that wanting-without-having-found-it state motivates the kind of loose, wide-ranging associative search that produces creative connections. This also explains a critical caveat the research requires: the creative benefit belongs to state boredom — the temporary experience of under-stimulation in a specific context. Chronic trait boredom, the enduring disposition to find most things unstimulating, does not produce the same effect and in some studies was associated with lower creative performance.

The phone book experiments

Mann and Cadman’s two studies tested whether boredom induced by a task improves subsequent creative output. In the first experiment, 80 participants either copied numbers from a phone directory for 15 minutes or went directly to a creative task — finding alternate uses for a pair of polystyrene cups. The boredom group produced significantly more creative responses than the control. In the second experiment, three groups were compared: copying phone numbers, reading phone numbers aloud, or control. The reading group outperformed both other conditions, producing the most creative output despite — or because of — the most passive and monotonous prior activity.

The pattern across both studies was consistent. Boring activity produced more creative output than no prior activity, and the most passive boring task produced the highest scores. The proposed mechanism is mind-wandering: boring tasks produce enough cognitive under-engagement to trigger spontaneous, unguided thought while retaining just enough attentional structure to prevent the blank paralysis of total unstructured freedom. Copying numbers occupies the brain enough to prevent deliberate effort, while leaving sufficient capacity for default mode processing to generate remote associations.

What busyness does to the creative system

The cognitive load side of the argument is more robustly supported and directly observable. A controlled experiment induced cognitive load through a number memorisation task and measured its effect on subsequent divergent thinking. High cognitive load significantly reduced both the quantity and variety of creative ideas generated. Continuous busyness — a state of perpetual cognitive load — locks the cognitive system in directed attention mode and structurally prevents the neural mode-switching that creativity requires. Creativity depends on the brain alternating between focused and diffuse processing. Constant task-switching, notification environments, and back-to-back scheduling eliminate the diffuse processing phase entirely.

Elsbach and Hargadon’s framework for workday design proposed deliberately scheduling low-cognitive-demand tasks — what they called mindless work periods — into the professional workday precisely to create the cognitive breathing room that genuine creative thinking requires. Their case studies of scientists and designers showed that the creative professional’s most productive schedules deliberately alternated between intense focused work and low-demand tasks that allowed default-mode processing to occur. Full schedules with no such periods consistently produced lower creative output, not higher.

The digital disconnection evidence

Atchley, Strayer and Atchley took 56 participants on four-to-six-day wilderness backpacking trips with no access to electronic devices and measured creativity before and after. Participants tested on the fourth day of the trip scored 50% higher on a creative problem-solving task than those tested before the trip began. The effect was attributed to the sustained removal of the attention-demanding cognitive load that constant digital connectivity imposes — the same mechanism that Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory identifies as depleting the directed attention system that creativity requires. The wilderness trip quantified what the boredom research predicts: extended cognitive under-stimulation resets the creative capacity that chronic busyness degrades.

The regulatory function of boredom

Elpidorou’s regulatory theory resolves some of the contradictory evidence in the literature. Boredom functions as a signal, not a creative state in itself — it signals that the current situation is under-stimulating and motivates the search for more meaningful engagement. When that motivation is channelled toward new ideas, unexplored problems, or novel creative directions, boredom produces creative output. When it is channelled toward low-value stimulation — phone-scrolling, passive entertainment — it produces neither creativity nor genuine engagement.

For entrepreneurs, the practical implication is direct. A moment of boredom during a routine task activates the approach-motivational state that drives creative exploration — but only if the response to boredom is to engage with a problem rather than to reach for a phone. The phone eliminates the boredom before the creative benefit can develop. The instinct to fill every moment of under-stimulation with digital content is specifically the behaviour that prevents the boredom-creativity pathway from operating.

Book worth reading on this

The Organised Mind by Daniel Levitin is the most directly applicable treatment of the busyness-kills-creativity argument. Levitin synthesises the information overload and cognitive load research and applies it to professional decision-making, creative work, and the structural changes that constant connectivity has made to the cognitive environment. His estimate that Americans were processing approximately 100,000 words of information daily outside of work by 2011 — five times the load of 25 years prior — puts the cognitive cost of the modern information environment in terms that make the experimental findings immediately legible. For any entrepreneur trying to understand why their most intellectually demanding work keeps failing to produce the results they expect, this is the book that identifies the environmental culprit most precisely.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Gasper, K. & Middlewood, B.L. (2014), Approaching Novel Thoughts: Understanding Why Elation and Boredom Promote Associative Thought More Than Distress and Relaxation, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 50–57. Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014), Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?, Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173. Rodet, C.S. (2022), Does Cognitive Load Affect Creativity? An Experiment Using a Divergent Thinking Task, Economics Letters, 219, 110827. Baird, B. et al. (2012), Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation, Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122. Atchley, R.A., Strayer, D.L. & Atchley, P. (2012), Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings, PLOS ONE, 7(12), e51474. Elsbach, K.D. & Hargadon, A.B. (2006), Enhancing Creativity through Mindless Work, Organization Science, 17(4), 470–483. Elpidorou, A. (2018), The Bored Mind Is a Guiding Mind, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(6), 698–702. Levitin, D. (2014), The Organised Mind, Dutton. Kaplan, S. (1995), The Restorative Benefits of Nature, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.