So here’s the situation: You’re bored and not sure what to do. Rather than scroll through Instagram or Netflix right now, you want to try and be productive somehow. You probably just don’t know where to start.
If that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place!
Below are my top tips for being productive when bored. We’ll start with a few ways you can plan and facilitate productivity, because productivity rarely happens without forethought.
Then we’ll dive into some skills everyone would benefit from learning.
So before we delay any further, let’s dive right in!
Plan Your Future Productivity
As we just mentioned, real productivity doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s usually pre-planned and premeditated. So why not use this time to develop your productivity techniques?
Productivity is something I’ve written a lot about in the past. From planning your ideal week setting up a bullet journal, there are many ways to get more productive – right now.
Below are my favourite ways to plan for future productivity.
1. Plan Your Ideal Week
The Ideal Week is a productivity technique that allows us to design our lives so we can live more intentionally. It helps us manage our tasks and work systematically towards our goals.
According to many productivity experts, the Ideal Week is the best way to plan our work. To-do lists tend to grow like a weed over time. The Ideal Week, on the other hand, groups our activities into time blocks in our calendar.
The Ideal Week helps us avoid multitasking and the resulting “attention residue”, which kills productivity. A good place to start here is to list your current responsibilities, goals and routines. We can then give each day a theme to focus on specific types of action.
Most people have goals, but we need dedicated systems to achieve our goals. That’s where the Ideal Week comes in.
Once we have an Ideal Week in place, it becomes much easier to plan each day. Ultimately, the Ideal Week can help us keep our focus and balance our priorities over time.
2. Perform a Weekly Review
We can use the Weekly Review to review our progress from the week. For example, we’ll see how much closer we got to our goals and how well we stuck to our Ideal Week.
We should schedule our Weekly Review at the same time each week. And feel free to try different times to see when your review is most effective!
For now, it might be worth adding a recurring event to your calendar. Include either a link to our Weekly Review or the steps from the article. That way, you can remove any friction from starting your review at that time. Of course if now is a good time, feel free to start right away!
You might find it best to review your week between Friday afternoon and Saturday evening, as it helps to wrap everything up before the weekend. You’ll probably find it easier to unwind when you’ve clarified the progress you made over the week and listed your priorities for the next week.
3. Brainstorm Optimal Routines, Methodologies & Templates
A big part of our work come down to things that can be automated. When I say “automate”, people’s thoughts tend to jump straight to tech. Usually automation means software that’s cutting-edge and complicated. But I prefer simple automations like routines, templates & methodologies.
Routines are multi-step actions, similar to habit stacks. For example, showering is a routine aimed at personal hygiene. There’s no limit to the number of routines we can have. Clear routines help us finish projects and regular groups of tasks much quicker. It’s also valuable to have optimal routines during pandemics and other major lifestyle changes.
We can use templates to speed up the creation of new documents that tend to follow a similar structure. For example, you might send similar emails every week. So why recreate the wheel with every email you send? Templates speed up the document creation, make your work more enjoyable and take hardly any time to implement. Ultimately, they help you focus on your most valuable work.
Methodologies are like routines that are documented and clear enough for anyone to follow without any additional context. This type of documentation helps speed up the delegation process. It’s especially useful when we’re about to go on holiday, need help from someone on our team or hiring a freelancer to do the job. We shouldn’t need to stop what we’re doing because someone else needs instruction on a repetitive task.
You can list out any potential routines, templates and methodologies right now. Whenever you have the time and energy, you can start documenting and organising them.
Simple automations can help us be more productive and prioritise high-value tasks everyday.
4. Set up a Bullet Journal
I recommend Bullet Journal to most people I meet who seem interested in practical productivity. It’s an entire note-taking system that helps us “track our past, organise our present and plan our future”.
If you find you have a hard time defining and reaching your goals, I can recommend using the Bullet Journal to achieve your goals. After all, it was instrumental in helping me brainstorm and start this website.
The most underrated aspect of Bullet Journaling is that it’s a paper notebook and doesn’t require any tech. I use it to organise my life without constant distractions from notifications.
It’s also oddly comforting to see things I’ve written in the past. Past work doesn’t just disappear like it might in digital folders. Instead, flipping through my BuJo will show what my priorities have been since I started using it.
I can’t overstate how often I use my Bullet Journal. I check in with it each morning to plan my day. I’ll take important notes in it throughout the day. I review my notes at the end of each day to reflect on my progress. And when necessary, I create custom collections to plan new projects and create new lists.
The Bullet Journal essentially an extension of my mind. Whereas my mind is the CPU, the Bullet Journal is an external hard drive system with unlimited storage and perfect memory.
You probably have an empty notebook lying around somewhere and start right away! If you’re interested in how it works, here are my top five Bullet Journal use cases.
Facilitate Future Productivity
The previous section includes some of my favourite productivity planning techniques. Now we’ll look into setting our future selves up for success by facilitating productivity.
5. Make a Productive Music Playlist
Do you have a productive music playlist? If not, it might be time to start one. And even if you do have one, did you do any research before creating it? That’s what I did when I tried to figure out if music helps productivity.
The short answer is that music can make us more productive, but it can also be a distraction. That’s why it’s important to listen to music that’s not too complex or lyrical when we work on cognitive tasks that require a lot of focus. Classical, nature, epic and video game music will generally be great for productivity.
On the other hand, if you’re working on a repetitive task that doesn’t take much focus, the goal is to keep us awake. That’s why we can sometimes listen to our favourite hip hop and pop songs during work hours. As long as it gives us energy.
With this in mind, it might be worth creating two different playlists. One playlist would include your favourite lyric-free songs, the other your all-time favourite songs.
Next time you feel the urge to listen to music while you work, you’ll be glad you turned your boredom into a custom productivity playlist.
6. Organise Your Home or Office Space
Another good use of time when you’re bored is to organise your home or office space. The reason this matters for productivity comes down to distraction.
Having a cluttered desk may make it harder to focus on the task-at-hand. Especially when every time we look away from our screen or notebook, something distracts us from our current task.
Organising from the inside-out is a clear framework for keeping our space tidy. Ultimately, this will reduce distractions in our environment, thereby safe-guarding our productive time.
7. Learn about Stoicism
I don’t think I could have gotten through this post without at least mentioning Stoicism. Widely considered a productive philosophy, Stoicism helps us be more mindful and live in the moment. Reading the work of the ancient Stoics, we can find many ways to motivate ourselves to live our best lives.
For example, as emperor of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius faced hardships everyday. But he somehow managed to motivate himself with the very obstacles that stood in his way. Whenever new challenges arose, he would remind himself that whatever stands in the way becomes the way.
We have the ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. The Obstacle is the Way. This line of thinking also helped me start this website.
There are more reasons to get into Stoicism beyond productivity. Clarifying my Stoic values has helped me find happiness and understand the importance of kindness. We can even learn to love things outside our control with the idea of amor fati.
If you’re not already familiar, learning about Stoicism would be a very productive use of your time. Its simple models have helped many great thinkers develop mental clarity and productivity.
8. Motivate Yourself to Wake Up Early Tomorrow
Growing up, I was never really a morning person. But once I started my research, I consistently began waking up before 8 everyday.
Now I manage to work on my website and other projects every weekday before i start my 9-to-5 job. It’s a simple routine that helps me get more done throughout the day. Now that’s my definition of productivity!
I also love starting each day on my own terms, prioritising the projects that matter most to me.
If you’re interested in waking up earlier, I’d recommend looking into the Miracle Morning System and Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts on waking up early.
9. Start a Journal
Journals are great for reflection. We can use them to clarify our values and write down our goals. It’s generally nice to have a database of our past reflections for future review.
In addition to understanding ourselves better, journaling can help us reduce stress and be more mindful. One of the main causes of stress, anxiety and other mental health issues is getting “stuck in our own heads”.
It’s easy to think that our perception of reality and reality itself are the same thing. In reality, past experiences have tainted many of our thoughts with bias.
Getting ideas down on paper help us distance ourselves from our ideas. This cognitive distance is the basis of mindfulness and modern psychology.
Even if you don’t have a notebook to hand, you probably have a piece of paper where you can start jotting down your thoughts. Getting your stream of consciousness down on paper will help you understand your thoughts more objectively.
Journaling also helps clear your mind, setting you up for productive future activities.
Learn New Productive Skills
Even if you haven’t found anything on this list that sounds interesting yet, you can still learn a productive new skill. Some of my favourite productivity skills include building better habits, improving my focus and productive rejuvenation.
10. Learn How to Build Better Habits
Do you wish you had better habits? Luckily for you, building new habits doesn’t have to be difficult. Atomic Habits lists out four rules for improving our habits, which revolve around simple changes to our environment and mindset.
We can use simple tricks like habit stacking to align new desired behaviours with our existing habits. With this method, we don’t need to consciously start each habit. We can simply start our routine and knock out several good habits at once.
In a similar fashion, we can avoid bad habits by understanding how cravings impact us.
11. Learn How to Improve Your Focus & Get Things Done
Two of the first books I read on productivity were Deep Work and Getting Things Done. These two methodologies are probably the foundation of my productivity passion.
The Deep Work premise is that we can produce significant results simply by making time to focus. An added bonus is that our work becomes more enjoyable and meaningful when we have dedicated time for focus. The worst thing that can happen for our productivity is needing to be reactive when something pops up mid-day.
Getting Things Done is a productivity system that helps us make sure no tasks slip through the cracks. Personally, I like to use the Bullet Journal as my GTD method. Bullet Journaling is perfect for capturing and organising tasks and information. That’s the whole point of GTD anyways!
12. Learn How to Rejuvenate for Productivity’s Sake!
Now that we’ve covered most of our favourite productivity techniques, you may be thinking that productivity is all about planning and working smarter. I’d say that’s about 90% true. Because without making time for effective relaxation and rejuvenation, we can’t expect to ever be productive.
There are 7 practices we should implement everyday to make sure we feel rejuvenated and ready to be productive.
These practices include:
- Sleep enough – which is the foundation of productive rejuvenation
- Eat well – eat healthy and enjoyable meals
- Move – exercise the body to find new energy
- Connect – spend time with the people you love
- Play – do things for the sole reason of doing them
- Reflect – take a step back to review your life and priorities objectively
- Unplug – disconnect from your email and to-do lists
If we take time to practice these rejuvenation techniques regularly, we’ll be in a good place to reach our peak productivity.
Learn Other Skills
Beyond all this talk about productivity, there are other skills we can learn that are also a good use of our time. From meditation and non-judgmental mindfulness to the practice of building wealth, here are my top recommendations for what to learn today.
13. Learn to Meditate
Meditation has become a hot topic the last few years. Especially in Europe and America, it was generally regarded as “woo-woo” until scientific studies started showing the benefits of meditation.
In fact, mindfulness and modern psychology both build on cognitive distancing, which helps us gain objectivity.
If you’re interested in meditation, here’s my quick-start Beginner’s Guide to Meditation. I also wrote a post on how to breathe during meditation since it’s such a big part of the practice.
14. Learn to Cultivate Non-judgment & Focus on What You Can Control
Another aspect of mindfulness is non-judgment, which can help us achieve inner peace.
The things in our lives are not inherently good or bad. We need to realise that the only thing that can be good or bad are our own thoughts and actions. That’s why Stoicism teaches us to become indifferent to our impressions.
We should focus only on things we can control. These things are the most practical use of our time and energy. Focusing on what we can control is the basis of our Stoic To-Do List.
15. Learn to Have Difficult Conversations
Another useful skill is learning how to have difficult conversations. I’ve heard that you can predict someone’s success in life by the number of difficult conversations they’re willing to have.
I think it’s important to realise that you don’t have to be a “bad person” just because you say something that might hurt someone’s feelings. In fact, many difficult conversations would be beneficial to the person who needs to hear it. But oftentimes we shy away, because we feel the worst thing we could do is hurt someone’s feelings.
Having good intentions allows us to enter into any conversation knowing that honesty is always right.
16. Learn How to Build Wealth
While this is slightly different to the other points here, I still wanted to mention it in this post. Sure, I know money’s not everything. I totally agree. But it still matters enough to take some time to understand how it works. After all, the worst thing about money is the anxiety from not having enough to cover all your expenses.
I first learned about building wealth in the book, The Richest Man in Babylon. I can recommend it to anyone who’s interested in having more money than they’ll ever need.
Without spoiling it too much, wealth creation comes down to saving a fraction of our wages that we can then use to invest in profitable business ventures. A big reason we’ll have more money than we’ll ever need is that we’ve already learned to live below our means.
Over time the money we save and invest become a nest egg that will help us retire with peace of mind.
Productive Things to Do When You’re Bored
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve hopefully found something productive to do while bored. Otherwise, I’m not sure I can help you.
We’ve discussed techniques to plan for productivity like creating an Ideal Week, performing weekly reviews, creating simple automations and setting up a Bullet Journal.
We also discussed ways to facilitate future productivity like creating a productive music playlist and organising your space. Learning about Stoicism is another great use of time, as well as starting a journal and learning to wake up earlier.
Next, we ran through productive skills you can develop to have a more effective and meaningful life. Some of the skills we discussed aren’t explicitly productivity-focused but are still a good use of time.
Now I’m out of ideas, so hopefully you found something relevant in this list. Otherwise, leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Feel free to get in touch or share on social media.
Learn to be more productive when you’re bored with practical techniques and Mind & Practice today.