General reframing

There are benefits to being bored at work. Among them, boredom is an opportunity to develop my ability to focus for long periods of time. Learning to live with boredom can only enhance my future ability to cope with it, and as Nir Eyal says

Time management is pain management

In this case, the pain of being bored is what leads me to distracting myself, using my time badly.

I've also identified specific opportunities which come from being bored at various times.

Types of boredom

While developing

Boredom during development is a sign for me that I'm struggling with a task. A repetitive task doesn't typically bore me, I tend to be able to put my head down and bash through them. Boredom strikes me when I'm stuck on something and don't want to put in the hard mental work of solving the problem.

This is an opportunity to identify that I'm stuck (which I may not have previously realised), take a break, and come back to the problem fresh. It's an opportunity for a reset.

It's also an opportunity to shift the way I'm thinking about my work. I can go into 'problem-solving mode' and make a plan (or several possible plans) for how to become unstuck and make progress again. Reasoning about the problem makes it less daunting, whereas allowing myself to be distracted by boredom only makes the problem seem worse when I do come back to it.

During meetings

When I'm bored in a meeting, it's often a sign that I don't understand the discussion. The boredom is a signal I can use to identify that, and provides me with an opportunity to learn more about the topic. I can use my boredom as a trigger, prompting me to say that I'm not following the discussion and asking for someone to explain it more. This means I can learn something while simultaneously making the meeting more enjoyable.

While waiting

There are times when I'm waiting for a slow process like running a build, migration or test suite. I've already written about this in the following article.

Have you noticed any benefits from reframing boredom as an opportunity?