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Boredom at work boosts creativity
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Some people never get bored at work because they simply don’t have time to do it, because they have so much to do that it’s hard to finish everything before the end of the workday. But there are also workers who simply languish from boredom and unemployment due to various circumstances. Some scientists believe that boredom at work fuels the obesity epidemic, because when there’s nothing to do, tea, coffee and goodies at least minimally brighten up the workdays of an unloaded worker. Other experts claim that boredom and a complete lack of desire to continue working can lead to stress and even depression. However, British scientists are in a hurry to reassure all workers who are tired of their own boredom, because, in their opinion, boring work can increase a person’s creativity, who in such a “dreary” state is able to find new ways to solve a given problem and approach tasks more creatively.
Experts say this is not surprising, because when a person is not busy, he has time to dream and just think.
The findings are being presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference, and lead authors of the study are Dr Sandy Mann and Rebekah Cadman from the University of Central Lancashire.
Dr. Mann and Kadman conducted two experiments involving forty people. In the first experiment, volunteers were given fifteen minutes to copy telephone numbers from a telephone directory and then asked to come up with as many uses for plastic straws as possible. Before the task with the plastic straws, the control group did not perform monotonous work. As it turned out, the first group of participants coped with the second task more creatively and showed more creativity than the participants in the control group.
To make sure their findings were correct, the scientists decided to repeat the experiment, only this time they involved more people and created three groups. One of them was again given the task of copying down the numbers before the next task with the straws, the second group was asked to simply read all the numbers written down in the phone book, and the third, the control group, began the task with the straws straight away.
The results were the same as in the first experiment, with the only difference being that people who reread the phone numbers performed better than those who rewrote them. As before, the control group performed the worst.
Therefore, as we see from the results of experiments conducted by scientists, the more monotonous and boring the work, the higher the creativity of a person and the greater the growth of his creative abilities.
"Employers do not accept boredom in the workplace as such; in their opinion, the employee should be loaded from the beginning of the working day until its end. But perhaps a bored employee will be able to come up with a brilliant idea or solve a task, looking at it in a new way and, thus, will be more useful than an exhausted and exhausted one," the researchers say. "At least, the results of our experiments indicate exactly this."
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