Being Bored and Brilliant

Last week’s Bored and Brilliant podcasts from New Tech City really have me thinking. So much so that I spent most of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday offline with my phone out of reach. The only exceptions were a photo I snapped and posted on Instagram and communicating with my book club via Facebook.  The rest of the weekend was spent working, reading, watching movies with my kiddos, and exercising.

The goal of the Bored and Brilliant series was to provide a week’s worth of challenges to help you detach from your phone and get in touch with your creative side. The idea is that our creativity is engaged best when we’re bored, but we don’t get that bored anymore because we have our phones to entertain us all day.

I have totally been there. I think, once you get through the initial excitement of having a phone or playing with a new app, the drain sets in. There’s always something to check, someone posting something somewhere, a new message. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. 

Not to get all preachy, but I knew as soon as I brought a smartphone into my life, I was going to have to impose some limits. For me, those have been things like not using the phone after the kids go to bed and deleting the Facebook app. Just this week, I moved the mail app way to the back screen that I never look at, and it’s been awesome to open up my phone and not have that little red number telling me how many emails I have waiting for me.

But I haven’t always been great at abiding by my own limits, and last year I spent six weeks offline except for Social Media Mondays (anyone remember that?!) because I needed to get a grip. Now I’m more inclined to not check anything and stay offline than get sucked into the rabbit hole.

The thing is, there’s always more things to check. It never ends. Even if you get caught up on your social media feeds, people keep posting, so you’re never caught up. At some point, I came to terms with that and realized that I can engage when I can, where I can. I can’t do it all, and I don’t even want to try.

For me, it boils down to the difference between creating and consuming. What I want to be doing, what I consider to be my life’s work in a variety of forms, is creating. I want to make stuff — beautiful photographs, insightful essays, craft projects that keep my hands busy and my heart full. If I’m always consuming, always scrolling and scrolling those endless feeds, I don’t have room to create. Worse, I find myself frustrated with comparison.

I have worked toward balance, and it’s created a shift for me to creating and working. I work and play and create first before consuming and looking around. It’s made a difference in the quality of my work and it’s made a difference in how much I can accomplish (ahem, reading 52 books last year) because I’m not distracted.

So, I took a break over the weekend and it was great. I listened to Bored and Brilliant and did some of the challenges (and I suggest you do too). I let my mind wander. It was awesome. I want more of that.