Boring Work Makes People Creative
Being bored at work might just give a boost to your creative side, says a new study that was presented at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology.
Researchers, Dr Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman from the University of Central Lancashire found that boring work can let the mind wander and find creative solutions to problems.
For the study, they asked 40 participants to complete a boring task of copying numbers from a directory for 15 minutes. These people were later asked to come up with ideas of using pair of polystyrene cups, a task that requires creative thinking.
Another set of 40 participants were asked to do the creative task first instead of the boring one.
Researchers found that, contrary to popular belief, people who completed the boring task were more likely to come up with the most creative ideas than people who just had to think about the ideas.
The researchers conducted another study to found if daydreaming was indeed increasing creativity. To test this, the team notched the boring quotient a bit more, by asking study participants to read the numbers instead.
Researchers once again found that people who were bored were more likely to come up with the best ideas.
"Boredom at work has always been seen as something to be eliminated, but perhaps we should be embracing it in order to enhance our creativity. What we want to do next is to see what the practical implications of this finding are," Dr. Mann said in a statement." Do people who are bored at work become more creative in other areas of their work - or do they go home and write novels?"