Better Boredom Hobbies
Killing Time More Gracefully
Happy Monday from Henderson, Nevada ☀️
I hope you had a fantastic father’s day. My dad and I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Pumping Iron, an unbeatable dad-day documentary in my opinion.
Now that I’m back in a predictable environment for a little while, I’m working on rebuilding good habits and routines. This week, I write specifically about designing habits to make better use of when you are bored.
Enjoy!
Better Boredom Habits
Preplanning Obstacles — Revisited
A few weeks ago, I wrote about anticipating obstacles and avoiding preventable failures.
The post discussed how I succeeded in trying the carnivore diet because I knew 2 things in advance
I’d face bad cramping
How to address that cramping (lots of salt)
Overall, the takeaway was simple: because I proactively thought through points of failure, I persevered.
This week, I apply the same idea to usefully managing boredom.
It All Comes Down To Habits
Most habits follow a very similar pattern: cue, routine, reward.
A cue triggers a habitual routine. Cues can be internal or external.
Some internal cues: hunger, fatigue, boredom, anger.
Some external cues: just woke up, got home from work, finished a meal.
Our habits are the set of actions we take in response to each cue.
A Simple Example
What is the very first thing you do when you get home from work?
Change to your workout clothes, OR
Crack open a cold beer
Do you see how this one cue & response pair sets the course for the rest of the evening? Therein lies the importance of thinking through our habits.
Cues Are Predictable
There are a few cues we inevitably face every week, if not every day.
We know that these cues will pop up. The question is will you preplan a good way to handle them, or let your default behavior drive you?
When you finish a meal, do you immediately clean up then take a short walk, or do you plop on your couch, leave your dishes to get crusty, and food coma your way into an Instagram binge?
What separates effective and ineffective people is how intentionally they develop useful routines for each of these specific, predictable cues. The choice is yours.
The external cues like meals and schedules are pretty easy to manage after you identify them, but what about internal (emotional) cues?
Redirecting Boredom
We intuitively do this on airplanes. We know we are going to be bored for 2-15 hours, so we preplan good uses of that downtime. We proactively download movies, buy a book we know we’ll enjoy, or set aside a specific work task.
While doing this for our occasional travel is a good start, I suggest also doing this same preplanning for the smaller bursts of everyday boredom. The accumulated daily 30-90 minutes certainly exceeds the few hours of monthly flight time anyway.
Instead of letting these short blocks of unallocated time lead to doom-scrolling, stock chart checking, or email refreshing, what if we preplanned a list of low-demanding tasks or activities?
What if boredom was a trigger to do something mildly useful?
Some Candidate Planned Boredom Activities
Our Goal — The Bar Is Set Pretty Low
My goal in writing this post is to inspire you to elevate your go-to boredom activity according to the following standards
Anything is better than doom-scrolling, doom-eating, or doom-watching
Anything is better than repeatedly checking Robinhood or Coinbase throughout the day (Stock/ Crypto prices)
Boredom can’t be treated with an app with “swipe to refresh” or other engrossing notification ecosystems
No mobile games unless it’s a digitized print game (i.e. Sudoku, Crosswords)
Boredom Activities Category 1: Get Off Your Butt
Eat some fruit, meal prep, clean the kitchen (or any other room, or your car), do laundry
Run an errand (post office, car wash, take out the trash)
Random act of kindness
Fitness, a short walk/ ride, maybe even phone a friend on the way
Boredom Activities Category 2: Stay On Your Butt
Edutainment. Crash Course makes incredible playlists on every subject.
Do Nothing. Now’s a perfect time to do that meditation thing you’d start doing.
Wikipedia/ Books/ Audiobooks
Reorganize your computer files/ free up hard drive space.
Doodle, Send Cold Emails, Text Old Friends.
Instapaper. Save articles during the week to a read-it-later app. Read when bored.
Environment Redesign Also Helps
Put good activities in the bathroom
Put a book on your toilet seat lid, I recommend The Daily Stoic.
Put good links on your browser
Create a folder on your bookmarks bar called “when I’m bored” - place interesting links there for later.
Put good apps on your home screen
Hide everything else.
Why This Type of Habit Design Works
The goal of habit design is to make it easier (or automatic) to do what is good for you.
It takes a lot of mental energy to notice you are bored, notice you are wasting time, brainstorm ideas, pick a useful one, and start doing it.
It does not take nearly as much mental energy to notice you are bored, pull up your list of good boredom activities, pick a useful one, and start doing it.
The habit of simply consulting the list makes everything else fall into place.
Make a better boredom habits list! Let me know how it goes.
What will you do next time you are bored?
Thanks For Reading!
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
Reply directly to this email. Leave a comment online.
Stay curious,
Louis
Hyperlinks To Various Things
Podcast Updates 🎧
LK #72 with Dr. Richard Schatz: An Invention That Saved 100+ Million Lives
LK #71 with Colton Sakamoto: Helping People Get Jobs In Crypto
LK #70 with Polina Marinova Pompliano: Profiling the most interesting people in history
LK Content Coming Soon 📅
Cole Schafer from Honey Copy
Joel Runyon from Impossible HQ
Quick Clicks
*** You could start saving these weekly links into your new productive boredom destination
(1) 💰 Investing Ideas💰: Money Made - Discover alternative investments
This website catalogs just about every mainstream fintech investment service. Robo-advisors, eREITs, other alternatives, crypto, etc. It’s worth a skim.
(2) 📝 Great Article 📝: Tiago Forte - Artificial Time
Tiago convincingly argues how computers are older than humanity.
Photo of the week — Finally Back In A Gym
I hardly went to the gym during COVID. It was annoying to get motivated for a specific goal only for the gyms to close and have to put plans on pause.
That’s why I switched gears to calisthenics as I could do it anytime anywhere.
With COVID looking better, I decided to finally rejoin.
I don’t intend to stop bodyweight exercises any time soon, but it feels great to be deadlifting and squatting again.
Brilliant 🎁🎁 very happy to see Notion checklist in there 😉 - also, not to go too Joe-deep, but boredom is a major pathway to life atrophy if you think about it... if you're in a bad environment, the law of cooling normally drags you towards what the masses are doing, because you have nothing stimulating to do... that's your intentionality point.
Point being, these small things can extrapolate to have a major impact.
Daily Stoic, nice!