100 things to do when you're bored without your phone

Most “things to do when you’re bored” lists are written for search engines, not for bored people. They’re padded, generic, and half the suggestions are “scroll Pinterest” or “watch a film”, which is to say, more screen.

This one is different in two ways. First, everything works without a phone. Second, it’s sorted by what you actually have (five spare minutes, an hour, a whole afternoon), so you can find something that fits rather than reading a hundred items hoping one lands.

A quick word on why, then the list.

Why being bored without a phone is worth it

Boredom is uncomfortable, which is why we reach for the phone. But the discomfort is functional. It’s your brain’s prompt to its own idea-generation system, run by what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the part of you most active when you’re doing nothing in particular.

A well-known 2014 study by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman found that people who were made to be bored beforehand produced significantly more, and more original, ideas on a subsequent creativity task than people who weren’t.^[1] A complementary study found that letting the mind wander improved creative problem-solving by around 40 per cent versus doing a demanding task instead.^[2] And the researcher Teresa Belton, interviewing creative adults about their childhoods, kept hearing that they’d been allowed to be bored, that the empty time was where their imaginations learned to work.^[3]

In other words: the bored moment you’re trying to escape is the doorway to the good stuff. Here’s what to do with it.

If you have five minutes

• Stand at the window and watch what’s happening outside
• Make a hot drink and drink the first few sips doing nothing else
• Stretch on the floor, no app, no plan
• Tidy one drawer or one surface
• Step outside for a minute, whatever the weather
• Look at the sky and find three different cloud shapes
• Do a lap of your home and notice three things you’d stopped seeing
• Sit in a chair and let your mind wander on purpose
• Water a plant, properly
• Write down one thing you’ve been meaning to remember
• Do ten press-ups, or any small physical thing
• Notice every sound you can hear right now

If you have twenty minutes

• Walk around the block with nothing in your ears
• Read a few pages of an actual paper book
• Write a letter or a postcard to someone by hand
• Sketch the thing in front of you, badly, for the fun of it
• Do a proper job on one small bit of cleaning
• Cook or prep something simple from what’s already in the kitchen
• Sort a pile that’s been bothering you
• Sit outside with a drink and do nothing
• Stretch slowly through your whole body
• Reorganise a shelf so it pleases you
• Brush the dog, the cat, or repot a plant
• Plan something to look forward to (on paper)

If you have an hour or more

• Go for a long walk and let your thoughts unspool
• Read until you lose track of time
• Start a small project you’ve been putting off
• Bake something
• Take everything out of one cupboard and put it back better
• Write: a journal entry, a story, a list of ideas, anything
• Teach yourself a small skill from a book
• Go somewhere on foot you’d normally drive to
• Draw, paint, or make something with your hands
• Do a jigsaw, a crossword on paper, or a real card game
• Sit in a café with no laptop and watch the world
• Have a long, phone-free conversation with someone

If you’re bored and a bit flat

The mistake here is reaching for stimulation. It briefly lifts the flatness and then deepens it. The better moves are gently physical or outward:

• Get outside, even for ten minutes. Daylight on your face changes your state more than you’d expect
• Move your body in any way at all
• Do one small, finishable task and feel it get done
• Ring someone rather than message them
• Make the bed, clean the kitchen, restore one bit of order
• Sit with the flatness for a few minutes instead of escaping it. It often lifts on its own

If you’re bored with kids around

• Hand them a “boredom jar” prompt and let them resolve it themselves (we make one, The Bored Box, but a jar of paper scraps works too)
• Go outside without a plan
• Build a den
• Bake together
• Give them a cardboard box and walk away
• Do nothing near them, on purpose, and watch them invent

The one-card version

If a hundred ideas is itself overwhelming, the honest distillation is this: put the phone in another room, and do the first thing on this list that you can reach. The point was never to be productive. The point is to be unstimulated for long enough that your own mind starts up again.

If you’d like that as an actual habit rather than a one-off, the studio makes a small set of Four-Minute Cards (52 tiny prompts, one a week) and the book the whole thing is built around, How to Be Bored Again. But you don’t need either to start. Put the phone down. Pick something above. See what happens in the gap.