Zomorodi's Bored and Brilliant Challenge and a Phone-Free Morning

“I kind of realized that I have not been bored since I got a smartphone seven years ago.” Manoush Zomorodi said that to NPR’s Audie Cornish in January 2015. She was then the host of WNYC’s New Tech City podcast, later renamed Note to Self, and she was about to ask her listeners to do something unusual: put their phones away and let their minds wander for a week.

She said she was checking her phone 50 to 100 times a day, a lot of it on the puzzle game Two Dots. She had also been stuck creatively. Her best ideas, she told the Art of Manliness podcast in 2017, tended to arrive in unplugged moments, and the thing missing from her hand during those moments was her smartphone.

This piece looks at what that project was, what the research behind it does and does not show, and how its ideas might apply to the first half hour after you wake up. That last step is my adaptation. I did not find anything showing that Zomorodi tested mornings specifically.

What was the Bored and Brilliant project?

Bored and Brilliant was a week of daily challenges run by WNYC. The NPR write-up of the launch, dated January 12, 2015, says the challenge officially started on February 2, 2015. Participants first tracked their phone use with the Moment app, which counts how often you unlock your phone and for how many minutes. Then they took steps to cut back.

Zomorodi told Art of Manliness that about 20,000 people signed up. Each morning they got a short podcast about the science and a challenge, and they reported back afterward.

The challenge list on WNYC’s 2016 “Boot Camp” page names six items: In Your Pocket, Photo Free, Delete That App, Fauxcation, Small Observation and Dream House. Publishers Weekly’s review of her 2017 book, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self (St. Martin’s), lists the book’s steps as tracking your digital habits, avoiding media while walking or driving, spending a day without taking pictures, deleting an app you think you can’t live without, taking a “fakecation” at the office by not replying to electronic messages, and choosing one thing in your environment to observe in depth. The seventh step, according to the review, is putting your new boredom to productive use. The review does not detail that step, and I did not find a source that does.

WNYC’s own description of the 2016 relaunch was blunt about the intent: “This is not a digital detox.” It said the project “is a way to apply what we know about constant notifications, neuroscience, and productivity to our lives.”

Did it work?

By one measure, barely. Zomorodi told Art of Manliness that the group “only shaved six minutes off our daily phone usage,” and that she “was really bummed.” On the other hand, she said that in survey results “90% of them felt that they had more power over their phone.”

Both numbers come from her on a podcast, not from a published analysis, so they are best read as the project’s own account. Still, the gap between them is useful. A week of daily challenges did little to the minutes and a fair amount to the feeling of control. That pattern, where intention and behavior drift apart, is where most phone rules fall over, and it comes up again below.

What is the research behind boredom and creativity?

Zomorodi leans on two kinds of evidence: experiments on boredom and creativity, and brain research on the default mode network.

Sandi Mann’s boredom experiments

The study she cites most is by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire. It was published in 2014 as “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?” in Creativity Research Journal (volume 26, issue 2, pages 165 to 173). The university’s repository abstract describes two experiments. The first had 80 participants, some of whom did a tedious writing task before a creative task while a control group skipped it. The second had 90 participants who did a tedious writing task, a tedious reading task or no boring task, and then a creative task. The authors report that boring activities increased creativity, and that in some cases the boring reading task did better than the boring writing task on convergent tasks. They discuss daydreaming as a possible link.

The details most people remember come from coverage of the same work when it was presented at a British Psychological Society conference in January 2013, reported by ScienceDaily. In that version, one group copied numbers out of a telephone directory for 15 minutes before listing uses for polystyrene cups, while a control group did only the cups task. The copying group came up with more creative uses. In a second experiment, a group of 30 copied numbers and another group of 30 read them; the reading group was more creative than the writing group, which the researchers linked to writing leaving less room for daydreaming. Mann was quoted saying boredom at work “has always been seen as something to be eliminated” and suggesting “we should be embracing it.”

I read the repository abstract and the press report, not the full paper. The ScienceDaily piece gives no statistical tests or group averages, and its group sizes (40 and 40, then 30 and 30 plus a control) are reported differently from the abstract’s totals of 80 and 90. I would treat the direction of the result as reported and its size as unknown.

When Zomorodi describes the same line of work, she puts it more colorfully. She told Art of Manliness that the people in Mann’s experiments first offered practical uses for paper cups, such as plant holders or sandbox toys, and, once “really, really bored,” moved on to stranger ideas such as earrings or musical instruments. That is her retelling. The published abstract I read does not include those examples.

Mind wandering and creative incubation

A second, independent study points the same way. Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood and colleagues, including Jonathan Schooler, published “Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation” in Psychological Science in 2012 (volume 23, issue 10). Participants worked on the Unusual Uses Task, then took a break that was either demanding, undemanding, a rest, or no break, and then returned to problems they had already seen. According to the abstract, the undemanding task “led to substantial improvements,” and the improvement was linked to higher levels of mind wandering rather than to deliberate thought about the problem. The abstract gives no sample sizes, and I did not read the full text.

The default mode network

Zomorodi tells listeners that folding laundry or staring at a wall engages the default mode network, and that this is when people do some of their most creative and original thinking. The term traces to Marcus Raichle and colleagues, whose 2001 paper “A default mode of brain function” appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (volume 98, pages 676 to 682). They used PET scans to measure oxygen extraction in awake, resting adults and found a baseline that was remarkably uniform across the brain, with some regions consistently decreasing in activity during goal-directed tasks.

That paper establishes that the brain has an organized resting mode. It does not say that the mode is where creativity comes from. The creativity link rests on later work and on interpretation, which Zomorodi presents with more confidence than the 2001 abstract does. The behavioral studies above are the firmer ground.

Put in one sentence: boredom is the uncomfortable stretch of low stimulation during which the mind starts to wander, and wandering seems to help with the kind of open-ended problem that has no single right answer.

Why would the first 30 minutes after waking be the place to try it?

Nothing in the sources I read says mornings are special for boredom. The case for starting there is practical. The first minutes of the day are mostly unstructured, nobody else is asking for your attention yet, and the first thing you pick up often decides the next hour. If that thing is a phone with a feed, the wandering time gets filled before it begins.

Zomorodi’s own steps translate fairly directly.

1. Count first. Her challenge began with tracking. For three mornings, write down what you touched in the first 30 minutes and what for. The Moment app she used counted unlocks and minutes, and most phones now include a built-in screen time report.
2. Put the phone in your pocket, or somewhere else. Her first challenge was keeping the phone out while walking or in transit. For mornings, that means the phone does not travel with you from bed to kettle to bathroom.
3. Try one photo-free morning. The project included a day with no photos. In the morning it can be simpler: no taking pictures of the coffee or the weather.
4. Move one app out of reach. Delete the one that fills dead time, or at least take it off the first screen.
5. Do the small observation. Pick one thing nearby and look at it for several minutes. A window, a plant, the steam off a mug.
6. Let the wandering happen, then use it. Keep a pen and paper where the phone used to be, so anything that surfaces goes down on paper and not into a notification.

Start with 10 minutes if 30 feels like a lot. The point of the longer window is that boredom needs time to arrive. Zomorodi’s line from the podcast is that you “can’t skip it,” that you “must pass through it in order to get to the good stuff.”

What if my phone is my alarm?

This is where most morning plans quietly fail. If the phone wakes you, silencing it puts it in your hand at the exact moment you wanted to avoid. A separate alarm solves most of that, and the alternatives to a phone alarm range from a basic clock to a sunrise lamp. There is also a fair counterargument that banning the phone from the bedroom is the wrong rule for some people, and that case against a blanket bedroom ban deserves a read before you rearrange the room.

The second weak point is the one Zomorodi’s numbers show: wanting to use the phone less and actually doing it are different things. A plan that depends on you remembering your own intentions at 6:45 a.m. is the weakest version. DontSnooze takes a different route: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you don’t, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose.

If you want something lower-tech, tell one person what the first 30 minutes will look like and report back to them at the end of the week. Zomorodi’s own project ran as a shared week, with a podcast and a challenge each morning and participants reporting back.

How do you know whether it’s working?

Zomorodi’s project suggests not judging it by minutes saved. Use two questions at the end of the first week. How many mornings did you actually keep the first stretch phone-free? And did anything show up in the quiet that wouldn’t have shown up otherwise, a problem solved, a plan for the day, an idea for a project? If the answer to the second is no after two weeks, you have lost nothing but a few feeds, and you can go back.

If the answer is yes, you have what Zomorodi set out to find: not a detox, but a daily stretch of time where the mind is allowed to drift. The research on that is supportive but modest. The experiment, at least, is cheap.

Sources read

Zomorodi, Manoush, interviewed by Audie Cornish, NPR/WNYC New Tech City, January 12, 2015 (via KAXE republication). Zomorodi on The Art of Manliness podcast, September 2017. WNYC Bored and Brilliant Boot Camp page, June 29, 2016. Publishers Weekly review of Bored and Brilliant, May 2017. Mann and Cadman (2014), repository abstract. ScienceDaily, January 9, 2013. Baird et al. (2012), PubMed abstract. Raichle et al. (2001), PubMed abstract.