During the last year and through my experience of lockdown, I have truly harnessed my feelings pertaining to moments of boredom and leveraged its times for rest, restoration, or opportunities for creativity with activities such as:
- Developing my mind-muscle
- Connecting with self
- Creativity brainstorming
- Leaning into my self-talk
- Limiting mind noise and overstimulation from digital
- Realigning and calibrating to my goals
- Relax my mind with nothing at all
- Connecting with my purpose and passion
- Focused work time
- Connecting with loved ones
- Self Care and wellbeing
In a world of digital distraction, I have learned to master my mindfulness, or at least what this means for me. In times of perceived ‘boredom’, I give myself the beneficial permission to designated timed slots for deeper relaxation.
Develop my mind-muscle (forgive the term)
During times like this, I would practice time on my mind to have focus. I would complete a focused task, play a game with my little one. I used the Pomodoro technique to ensure that my mind was focused for 25 minutes with no interruptions, therefore, developing my mental mind muscle.
Connect with self
Allowing myself the space to exercise, declutter and reward myself.
Connected to loved ones
- Virtual Exercise with my Grandma
- Zoom connection calls
- Catch ups
- Texts of love, support, and encouragement
- Virtual date nights
Creativity Bonus
I truly enjoyed the time of just ‘being’ and benefiting from the creativity bonuses of being ‘bored’. This included real-time to brainstorm business projects and ideas. Use the focused time to develop software and also explore ideas that may now come to an end.
Lean into my self-talk
Quite often I realize that much of the self-talk is not conducive to the results which I am aiming to achieve. However, they are often founded, albeit often falsely; often self-talk is just mind chatter, which is there to serve and protect me. The pandemic has allowed me to explore such self-talk to understand who I need to become to achieve such ambitious goals.
To truly explore whether there is any premise to such fear and to understand the nature and myself talk.
I have truly found great solace in developing self-development methods and extending hopeful self-talk to positive affirmations and any less unhelpful self-talk to areas for further improvement.
Limit mind noise and overstimulation from digital
I committed to :
- Letting loved ones, clients, or my colleagues know office hours and focused work times
- Using the Pomodoro technique
- Timed activities
- Muting notifications
- Reducing social media time
When this ‘focused boredom time was broken’ I lost the beautiful creativity which seemed to flow.
Realign and calibrate to my goals
The hidden benefits of organizing ideas and brainstorming
Relax my mind with nothing at all
Connect with my purpose and passion
I observe that many people use these words loosely but what that has meant for me is connect him with things that actually provide and give me the full good feelings such as accomplishment or the fact that I’m taking care of myself as well as the fact that I am completing a project and fulfilling commitments.
Focused work
Boredom, procrastination or lack of clarity definitely creeps in particularly during pandemic as a consultant much of my work is based on creativity.
I have now chosen times when I am more productive and cheese three-time slots during the day with something to focus solely on. I have also chosen to also have 3 free times of the day, where I allow myself to have the space for thinking time.
I truly pre-pandemic did not allow myself to have space to do this, my diary was filled with vast responsibilities activities, and deliverables. The benefits of ‘clarity boredom time’ have been phenomenal.
Self Care and wellbeing
I believe that many have a notion that mental health is something that is the aftermath. During lockdown and certainly during the pandemic I have seen the need to have practices for self-care to aid my mental well-being. I have enjoyed taking the time to connect with loved ones, colleagues, and friends.
I recently lost my grandmother, it happened very quickly and I really believe that I fell into a space of shock. As a consultant as well as the nuances of homeschooling and being in lockdown I found myself often being ‘still’ collecting my thoughts or crying. Guilt and shame crept in, feeling somewhat lazy (I am a chronic doer’) for taking an hour break.
In hindsight after discussing with a colleague, I realise I was really experiencing grief. In those moments of stillness, I had actually felt lazy dare I say it and guilty.
Reframing moments of boredom has not only improved my self-care practices, but it has also resulted in completed projects, productivity, daily well-being and self-care
I have learned that I rather appreciate those times in a world full of diary appointments, duties, commitments and have fully committed to building in ‘boredom’ time to my routine for growth and wellbeing.