Have you ever had a bunch of things you needed to get done, but you just didn’t have the motivation to get working on it? Productivity hacks won’t help much, but boredom will.
I think it all began with The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. My mom tried out his method, and I thought it looked cool. I was probably only something like 14 years old at the time, and I didn’t have much going on in my life worth organizing, but the idea of having everything important to me organized into one notebook that I could carry around with me just felt like it was going to solve all my problems somehow.
I tried out using a bullet journal for several months, but I just didn’t have any thoughts or responsibilities that needed to be organized, so I ditched it. Even as I started attending highschool and developing my hobbies, I still felt little need to organize or record anything.
When I left home, my sudden need to stay on top of finances, schoolwork, responsibilities at church, and cooking caused me to spend several years trying a variety of digital systems as well as trying out a bullet journal a couple more times, and to learn a bunch of strategies such as the Getting Things Done method by David Allen. Bullet journals helped me stay more mindful of everything that was happening, but they weren’t as quick and convenient as any of the digital systems I tried. Unfortunately, nothing I tried actually helped me beat procrastination, stop wasting time, and get on top of my personal development goals.
Then it dawned on me that what I needed was motivation. I had thought that these systems, strategies, and tools were designed to motivate me, but they weren’t. Their purpose is to help me get organized, not to help me get motivated. They only serve to channel the motivation that already exists and to make it count. Sure, implementing a new productivity system comes with an extra burst of motivation, but it’s a short burst; it fades once the novelty of the new system wears off. I wondered if the solution was to consistently hop from one system to another, seeking the burst of new fervor that each hop would bring.
The insight that gave me the motivation I was looking for came when I learned about how our brain interacts with dopamine.
Since our brain gets some dopamine each time we do something fun or exciting, it’s only natural for us to learn that doing fun things gives us dopamine. It seems to follow that doing more fun things means more dopamine and doing less fun things means less dopamine. Simple. Right? Fortunately, that’s not how our brains work. The truth is, if you cut out some of the high-dopamine activities you used to fill your time with, your brain will re-adjust to the new average levels of dopamine it gets. Put simply, if you cut out some fun stuff from your life, some of the boring stuff becomes fun just to compensate. Our brains are very flexible like that!
There is a catch though: if you keep telling yourself that you’re missing out or that your life sucks because it seems kinda boring compared to others’ lives, you won’t be able to gain the benefits of a slower lifestyle. You have to embrace the change with an open mind, and choose to have a positive attitude about it. Overtime, I think the benefits will become apparent to you as you try it out.
How is this relevant for increasing productivity? By cutting out or cutting back on some of the fun things I was spending time on such as video games, social media, YouTube, browsing the internet, and watching movies, and by incorporating some less interesting ways of relaxing such as going on walks and writing down my thoughts, I found that I was beginning to find more joy and satisfaction in getting chores done. Excited by the results I saw, I’ve continued to find more little ways of making my life a little more boring (from an outside perspective) so I can be more interested in doing the things I should be spending my time on.
Essentially, we all just need to develop a better relationship with boredom. Instead of thinking of it as simply a frustrating feeling that enters the stage when nothing else is happenning, we should think of it instead as the feeling of our mind relaxing and preparing to be focused and motivated for the next thing we do. When we feel bored, we should embrace the feeling instead of hurriedly trying to replace it with something.
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