
Why boredom is anything but boring - fitzwatermellow
http://www.nature.com/news/why-boredom-is-anything-but-boring-1.19140
======
stepvhen
I haven't had a work task at my job for 6 months, sans a week of QA testing,
and a few days in SQL. I come to work, and have to be left to my own devices,
and I never connected my personal laptop to the internet there. I tried to
study text books and work on projects, and that worked most of the time, but
not all the time. Its absolutely exhausting finding something to do that looks
like work, for at least 4 hours every day, for 6 months, with very limited
options.

That tendency for boredom has leaked into other parts of my life and I am
actively trying to fight it, and that is difficult. I hope this research
continues and turns up decent conclusions.

For the record, I gave my two-weeks this past week. 6 months is long enough.

~~~
grecy
My last job was a little similar, and only towards the end did I realize how
other people dealt with this. Here is what they did (I never did it):

Get to work kind of early, put your stuff on your desk, fill coffee mug, etc.
Make it look like you're there. Re direct your office phone to your cell.

Take your laptop or books you want to study to the nearby coffee shop, and do
whatever you want there - side projects, learning, teaching yourself
programming languages, etc. etc. Be sure to answer your cell and respond to
work emails.

Come back into the office around lunch time and sit in the lunch room to eat,
then head out again for the afternoon. It's easy to cover your tracks by
saying you were in a meeting, or working with so-and-so, or whatever.

It took me a long time to understand it was better to do the above, than it
was to sit at your desk and be seen to not be working hard (i.e. reading a
programming book, or reading HN)

~~~
jacquesm
That's a pretty sloppily run place if nobody notices structural behavior like
that. And even if nobody notices, that's pretty bad behavior. I've worked in a
place once long ago where people did everything they could to avoid actually
working and I left simply because of that. Being told to 'slow down because
you're making us look bad' is extremely de-motivating.

~~~
bpchaps
I've been told that at just about every job I've been at in the past, and
you're right.. It's incredibly de-motivating.

Most recently, I quit my job after 4 months because I tried to make too many
improvements. Every time the topic of an improvement came up, I was told
"You're the new guy. You can't expect to know the nuance of our
infrastructure/application/code." It's the biggest cop-out, especially
considering it began with, "You're the new guy with a fresh pair of eyes and
great experience. If you see any problems, let us know!". It's a silly state
of affairs when folk think of good intentions entirely in the lens of a threat
model.

In fairness, I suppose I was a bit too critical. Maybe it comes from reading
too much HN. :)

~~~
jacquesm
Hang in there, not all employers are equal in this respect. Try to find a
company with a high hiring bar, that will improve your chances of finding a
team without that mentality.

~~~
bpchaps
You'd be surprised. Most places I've been to initially say that they aren't,
but as soon as anything goes mildly south, that mentality changes in a
heartbeat. I'm generally "the young rockstar", so a lot of it is an aspect of
a lack of trust, I think.

I stopped hanging in there, rented out an office and started working on my own
thing. ;)

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe, even better.

------
alva
Boredom is extremely important to me, although potentially there is something
else at play.

Some of the biggest life decisions I make come at the end of a spell of
boredom. Either as a result of too long doing monotonous work, or purposely
self-induced, perhaps in order to let my subconscious do all the work and let
a solution float to the surface.

------
wfo
I think any treatment of boredom, scientific or not, is woefully incomplete
without reference to the man who understood it better than anyone, Soren
Kierkegaard. He uses it as a vehicle for discussion and engages in it at a
level I haven't seen since. This particularly funny and biting essay should be
required reading for anyone interested in understanding it from a
philosophical or psychological context:

[http://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/145.%20THE%2...](http://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/145.%20THE%20ROTATION%20OF%20CROPS.pdf)

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dhimes
I can't stand those kinds of questionnaires where you have to choose between
two extreme answers to an ill-posed question. ( _The thought of watching
someone else 's vacation pictures bores you_\-- agree/disagree: It depends on
the person! duh!)

For what it's worth, I got a 4/28.

~~~
cfcef
Forced-choice is deliberate because it maximizes the information of the
question. If you put in intermediate options, that can mask real differences
by letting peoples' differing preferences for certainty influence whether
their responses are informative or not. (People have information or
preferences they don't even realize they have, like in some perceptual tasks,
and you can't detect this without something like a forced-choice because if
you give subjects any other options, they'll just say they don't know.)

~~~
dhimes
Interesting. Forced-choice is ok if the question is completely clear. In many
cases you have to assume information that makes the difference in which choice
you pick, I find. Unless that in itself is what is being tested (do you
implicitly supply optimistic or pessimistic information? for example). The
problem with these questionnaires is that they get a lot of information from
people who don't take it seriously so they don't learn anything either. In
other words, it's my preference for _clarity_ that is making my responses
uninformative for the survey-giver.

------
dschiptsov
Because that feeling of boredom has been evolved to avoid getting stuck into
reatricted, repetitive behavior patterns - behavioral infinite loops
(increased feeling of boredom should act as a breaking threshold).

Mield forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such
behavioral loops.

~~~
epalmer
> Mield forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of such
> behavioral loops.

Attribution please.

~~~
dschiptsov
Even the wikipedia page tells us that repetitiveness is one of hallmarks of
Asperger.

The question why, still unanswered, is much more tricky. It seems that, like
it is with a language and many other traits, there is a genetic predisposition
and environmental conditioning (training). It seems that autistic people has
some genetically transmitted factors, which, if behavior patterns in early
childhood is not corrected, would result in behavioral deviations, such as
extreme shyness, inability to maintain an eye contact, sociophobia etc.

The famous "mind blindness", it seems, is an effect, a symptom, not the cause.
Those children just didn't train themselves enough to recognize facial
expression patterns properly because, perhaps, some inherited changes in the
"social areas" of the brain which, for example, perform facial expression
recognition.

Why are such areas supposedly exist? Because even newborns could distinguish
calm and friendly face from angry, etc. Facial expressions is the most
efficient way to read other people's emotions, along with other non-verbal
bodily ques, such as posture and jerky movements. No one taught them to do it,
so it is somehow hard-wired. Animal, of course, also read body-language, much
better than we are.

Inability to read (or rather interpret) other people result in excessive
anxiety, almost physical discomfort, and repetitiveness, as an effect, is
probably an acquired habituation to deal with that anxiety.

~~~
adrusi
I think "too many behavioral loops" is an elegant way of succinctly explaining
a lot of the symptoms of autism, but there's more to it, and moreover, "too
many behavioral loops" can describe other forms of cognitive dysfunction.
Anxiety disorders like OCD come to mind.

Anyway "Mield [sic?] forms of autism, by the way, is when you have too many of
such behavioral loops" is incorrect. I don't think that simply exhibiting the
"behavioral loop" symptoms would be sufficient for a diagnosis at least.

