125. Why Staring at a Blank Wall is My New Favourite Productivity Hack.

I have gotten very good at one thing these past few months. And in my mind, it is the best productivity hack in the world.

I’m talking about staring at walls.

Confused? Let me explain.

We live in a “pick your poison” world.

We are constantly feeding ourselves information, and by media of our choices.

• If you are a reader, you have carousels with elevator music to entertain you while you wait.
• If you are a listener, you have podcasts from your favourite influencer.
• If you are a watcher, well, I don’t have to tell you about the “short form video” economy.

The media would change by the day, and even by the time of day. To a primal brain, this is what productivity is supposed to be. Always be learning.

But what if I told you, that there is a better way to be productive, and it requires you to actually do nothing?

Boredom fosters productivity

I have talked about my surgery in the past few posts. The surgery gave me a lot of experiences, both positive and negative. But the biggest advantage I gained out of surgery was time. I gained time that was being spent while just living life.

Don’t get me wrong. Parts of my recovery were soul crushing. Not being able to do the things I used to do was incredibly hard for me (Read more about it here). However, because my life had halted, basically because I had physically halted, I was able to think.

I had been living on cognitive autopilot.

Things I was planning

Things that were happening

Things I was consuming.

But my conscious thoughts, which stem out of information I have processed over the years, my conditioning and my current state of mind were not getting an outlet.

And the halt gave me time to engage in conscious thinking.

We assume thinking is only automatic. In reality, however, thinking takes effort.

Back to staring at walls.

Staring at walls allowed me to be bored. I had considered boredom an enemy for so long, that I forgot what it felt like to be bored.

Boredom is the vacuum between automated thinking and conscious thinking. Boredom allows for anything suppressed within us to come to surface. These “things” are real feelings which alter our judgment and make us less effective as human beings, unless dealt with.

Boredom, by bringing these feelings to the surface, allow us to deal with them. Dealing with these feelings can help us change paradigms we have subscribed to. These altered paradigms make us more effective as human beings.

Putting it in practice

I used to fill all my spare time staring at my cell phone, scrolling through YouTube shorts, which I feel is closer to staring at the wall than we realise. I gained a lot of useless, unstructured information, which may or may not ever be useful to me.

Now, every time I catch myself down the YouTube rabbit hole, I do a simple exercise.

1. I employ the 3 second rule (Read Goalcast’s article here).
2. I put my phone down.
3. I start staring at the wall for a few minutes.

This works because

1. The three second rule breaks the current scrolling pattern.
2. Putting my phone down brings the change in pattern to a physical dimension.
3. Staring at the wall makes me bored enough for my brain to bring up tasks that I have been procrastinating against.

Our brains like to take the path of least resistance. The most resistance is usually in what we actually should be doing. The least resistance is usually doing a quick dopamine releasing action, like the infinite scroll pattern. Guess which one is productive?

The next time you find yourself getting bored while watching Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, do yourself a favour, put the phone down. Let the room grow quiet. You might find that the blank, white expanse of a wall is the most interesting thing you’ve looked at all day; a canvas where your next great idea is finally allowed to show up.