Attempts to suppress boredom on one task leads 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 and one of the researchers. “It signals this is not good use of time; go do something else.”
Forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the study shows that alternating boring tasks with meaningful ones helps prevent the effects of 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.
Two studies surveyed workers throughout their workday finding that those who were bored at time-one, mind-wandered more at time-two and as a result were less productive at time-two. These studies show that employees often suppress boredom at work which, rather than preventing the effects of boredom, puts them “on hold” until a later point in time, Kapadia noted.
In a third study, participants were randomly assigned to watch a boring video on the different kinds of paint that can be used inside a house or a more interesting one on a Rube Goldberg machine. Following the video, participants were told they had to write an essay that would be used to train an algorithm.
The findings revealed that when participants were bored their minds wandered more and had lower productivity, Kapadia explained, but when they were told that the algorithm 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.”
That’s where meaningfulness comes in, she added, capturing your attention and preventing boredom from spilling over to inhibit future productivity.
What can a manager do?
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.
How you deal with the boredom can have a lasting effect on the next task, she said.
“You can find meaningfulness in just about every task,” said Kapadia. “If you can think about it from a larger perspective, you can focus on how your work impacts others’ lives.”
Kapadia conducted the research with Casher Belinda, University of Notre Dame, and Shimul Melwani, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.