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By Cynthia Corzo
Attempts to suppress boredom on one task lead to mind-wandering, which results in decreased productivity on the following activity, FIU Business research finds.
"When you feel the need to suppress boredom you deplete your cognitive resources, your willpower," said Chaitali Kapadia, assistant professor of global leadership and management at FIU Business and one of the researchers. "It signals this is not good use of time; go do something else."
Published in the June 2024 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, the study shows that alternating boring tasks with meaningful ones helps prevent boredom from affecting future tasks.
"Boredom tries to get you to think of something else and your mind wanders, searching for something meaningful," Kapadia said. "By seeing if you can generate meaning in the next activity, you will not mind-wander and will interrupt that effect of boredom."
Employees often suppress boredom at work to "power through" boring tasks, resulting in residual stints of mind-wandering, which reduces productivity on subsequent tasks, she said.
Researchers conducted two field studies and one experiment with a total of more than 1,500 participants to demonstrate the lingering negative effects of boredom on mind-wandering and future productivity and how task meaningfulness can break this negative cycle.
The findings revealed that when participants were bored, their minds wandered more and they had lower productivity, Kapadia explained. But, when they were told that the task they were assigned would be used to help children with autism – which gave the task more meaning – it reduced their mind-wandering and increased productivity.
"At work you can't walk out of a meeting because you're bored," Kapadia quipped. "You imagine what happens after its done because you're not stuck there."
One option is to do something meaningful following a boring meeting or task in order to break the cycle of boredom. Managers can highlight the importance and impact of different tasks, so that employees can find more meaning in them.
"If you can think about it from a larger perspective, you can focus on how your work impacts others' lives," said Kapadia.
Kapadia conducted the research with Casher Belinda of the University of Notre Dame and Shimul Melwani of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
