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> “Boreout is chronic boredom. That sums it up,” Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones

> “Boreout is chronic boredom. That sums it up,” Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones in your ears, no work to do, you're getting paid, and people are complaining about this? I seriously hope this article is part of some shadowy PR campaign to make people work harder or justify austerity or something. It's hard to believe this is BBC. People work for money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ > What happens more often, she says, is that people will just show up at their desks and spend time shopping online, cyberloafing, chatting with colleagues or planning other activities. She says that these people aren’t lazy, but are using these behaviours as “coping mechanisms”. Shopping online, talking to friends, and planning other activities are all things everyone needs to do. They're not coping mechanisms, this is just people getting all their stuff done at work so they have more time to do things important to them. > Harju describes boreout as “kind of a signature syndrome” of the pandemic; our ennui fueled by too much time in Zoom meetings, surrounded by the same four walls. Does Harju understand that the organization has made the decision to pay people to attend them? How anyone can see a job as anything other than a way to sell time for money is beyond me. Being bored at work would be wonderful. Being bored remote is even better. If I could just get the paycheck and benefits and have absolutely 0 obligations to the company, that would be optimal.

femto 5y ago
> ..., no work to do, Generally the case is that there is still way to much to do, so you can't do your own thing: but your assigned tasks are meaningless. Think of being paid to dig a hole and fill it in again, and you will be fired if you don't spend your time doing that, even though the net effect would be the same if you just did nothing. The result is the double whammy of being burnt out by an avalanche of meaningless tasks.
lethologica 5y ago
You've clearly never been in the situation then. It's fine for the first couple of weeks. Maybe even the first few months. But when one third of your life or more is spent with absolutely no meaning what so ever, when you hands feel tied behind your back due to certain obligations / job prospects / whatever, it wears you down. It did for me. It drove me to the point of wanting to end it all. I really hope you're never properly bored at work.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
  Boreout sounds amazing in a remote work situation.
  - soylentgraham 5y ago
    Until guilt sets in. I started getting anxious that I would be "found out", but every week ended again being told I was the most productive. I ended up quitting when someone popped up with a much more creative job
    - rjzzleep 5y ago
      It's not guilt that's the problem. Just because you're in a remote work situation doesn't mean you just stop thinking about the boring shit that you do. Meetings also don't stop. You get angrier and angrier about the whole situation. It nags on you and actually spend more time thinking about it than you would normally spend on it outside of work. I guess there are quite a lot of people that can just tune out things they don't like, but I'd wager most people are not capable of that trait. I think the more competent you are the more it bothers you not to produce anything. And it's not related to guilt, at least it never was for me(and looking around in this thread I'm obviously not the only one). Just because you are paid doesn't mean you want to pass your life without perspective. This is basically someone sucking your life away without drive or mission and only compensating in money. And if there is any truth to the "Drive!" book, then the money is almost secondary to the other two factors.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    No, if you straight up do "fun things" (watch movies or play video games) then you won't be motivated to work even when it's time for "boreout" to end. So you must do "work safe" activities that wont get you fired all day which is worse than doing boring work that lets you feel useful.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I’m so sorry that it got so bad for you. I recently quit my job because I was in that situation. I literally had nothing to do. I had maybe 8 hours of actual work a week. Paid really well to do basically nothing all things considered but it drained my soul. Being at home made it more tolerable but after cooking, baking, reading, side projects, getting my side hustle off the ground, exercising, starting an herb garden, taking up sketching, finishing my entertainment backlog, I don’t even know anymore I just couldn’t do it. There’s something so terribly draining about having so much “kinda free time” where I might have to do random tasks sporadically but is otherwise completely empty.
andrewzah 5y ago
This is simply not the case once you’ve been in that situation long enough. It’s pretty terrible. I would rather have lots of busywork than be sitting on my hands with nothing to do yet still have the obligation for the company. Working on something due to lack of work during a zoom meeting is entirely different than doing something in my own time when I have zero obligation to get called out of it at any moment. This prevents Deep Work from occurring. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying, and work is simply not just “time for money”. The shopping online etc that they’re referring to is being done out of boredom, not out of necessity. It’s a dopamine loop. Same with browsing social media or chatting online. Please don’t dismiss people and handwave when they’re trying to discuss issues.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
  Would love to be in a situation like this. How do you find a job that lets you do nothing? I’d be happy to work on personal projects, learning new things, working a second job, etc
  - tdfx 5y ago
    > working a second job This is the part I don't understand. If your job's expectations are so lax, why not potentially double your income?
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Well, these situations usually involve you having to be physically present and won't allow you to be out of office randomly for hours at a time. So that limits the kind of second job you could take. Also, many people work on fairly locked down computers with nothing much to do aside for (filtered) internet and random "corporate" apps. I'd be quite surprised to learn that in these kinds of situations, where people are required to be physically present to do nothing, they would be allowed to bring in their own computers and openly do private stuff.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    You have to account for what you're doing with your time and how it benefits the company and demonstrate that you're making progress. Unless you're better at managing a complex set of lies than most human beings, you're probably not going to succeed at it.
cwilkes 5y ago
The zero obligations is the gotcha here: you’re still responsible for making decisions based on the boring meetings that take up your entire day. And since people think they can fill up your calendar with meetings they do and then you’re only left with time outside of work think about mundane issues — which probably have some major consequences but who cares as you’ve sat through dozens of hours of meetings about it.
hrbf 5y ago
Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to it, I could finish a weeks’s worth of work in half a day. The rest was wasted time and waiting around. Plus, someone else controlled my time. I had to sit in my chair at my desk for eight hours, take a one hour lunch break in the middle of the city, never leaving the office otherwise. You have no control over the most important parts for the largest part of your waking day. You are asked to do meaningless busywork that wouldn’t need to be done at all if automated even in a half-assed way. There is zero reason for you to sit in the office all day, wasting hours upon hours except for your boss mandating it. 100% of the non-automated remaining parts of your job could be done remotely, by telephone and email. This crushes you eventually, depending on personality type sooner or later, especially when your mind is accustomed to tackling and solving problems. It grinds away at your sense of self, drains you of energy, it quite literally drives you slowly insane. You try not to think about it but you do. You try to read, surf the internet, stay in touch with others and do all the things you can do somewhat stealthy. Because when you eventually ask for more stuff to do, you get assigned to sorting contents of binders. Because, according to my boss at the time, “there’s always something to do”. Busywork. Got it. It makes you depressed, severely so. You realize that nothing you do matters at all and there’s no point to your job anyway. Every trivial task eventually becomes an immense burden that sometimes takes you days to complete, despite being a 30-minute task. In a way this means you have come full circle. You feel your mind rotting away. You feel that you have reached the end of your rope and this is what your life will be from now on. But if you raise your voice and speak up, all it earns you is the scorn of the boss and other (really bad) colleagues that want things to stay as they are. Some companies may well have an expectation of owning your time regardless of outcome and some people may well be cynical and empty enough to live with this situation, I for one would rather be dead. It took me four years and a nervous breakdown to finally throw the towel, with no regard for what happened to me afterwards. Yeah, quite a walk in the park those jobs are. Relaxing. Quite ideal.
sometimesokay 5y ago
I sometimes experience “boreout” on days where most of my team members are on holidays or when it’s a bit slow at work. However I still have to be “at the computer” even if I’m not doing anything. On the days I am bored, I don’t have motivation to even shop or cyberloaf. With remote work I literally touch my mouse, make sure my teams status is green, walk away and do something else at home. Sucks because I can never disconnect from work for the day. I wish we would advance quicker into performance based / tasks oriented work rather than just needing to be available.
stonecharioteer 5y ago
As others have said, being bored at work is extremely stressful. I am on the verge of leaving a company where I'm totally bored, for an early stage startup where I will be put to the grind. Oddly when I was in such a job before I had the energy to do other projects. I made the time. Now I have the time but it seems.... Meaningless. I am a developer who codes for fun as well, but in the last year I have not written any code worth talking about. My job is a joke because of how badly organized the company is. I went to therapy, tried to see if I had ADHD because I was slowly sinking back into my old habits of jumping between tasks and not prioritising work. Ultimately I decided I need to leave the company because it wasn't me. I was a bad cultural fit because I'm a person who does things for fun. Work was not fun. It was killing me.
billyruffian 5y ago
Boredom as a technique for pruning staff. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_electronics_firms/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_e...

femto 5y ago

> ..., no work to do, Generally the case is that there is still way to much to do, so you can't do your own thing: but your assigned tasks are meaningless. Think of being paid to dig a hole and fill it in again, and you will be fired if you don't spend your time doing that, even though the net effect would be the same if you just did nothing. The result is the double whammy of being burnt out by an avalanche of meaningless tasks.

lethologica 5y ago

You've clearly never been in the situation then. It's fine for the first couple of weeks. Maybe even the first few months. But when one third of your life or more is spent with absolutely no meaning what so ever, when you hands feel tied behind your back due to certain obligations / job prospects / whatever, it wears you down. It did for me. It drove me to the point of wanting to end it all. I really hope you're never properly bored at work.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
Boreout sounds amazing in a remote work situation.
- soylentgraham 5y ago
  Until guilt sets in. I started getting anxious that I would be "found out", but every week ended again being told I was the most productive. I ended up quitting when someone popped up with a much more creative job
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    It's not guilt that's the problem. Just because you're in a remote work situation doesn't mean you just stop thinking about the boring shit that you do. Meetings also don't stop. You get angrier and angrier about the whole situation. It nags on you and actually spend more time thinking about it than you would normally spend on it outside of work. I guess there are quite a lot of people that can just tune out things they don't like, but I'd wager most people are not capable of that trait. I think the more competent you are the more it bothers you not to produce anything. And it's not related to guilt, at least it never was for me(and looking around in this thread I'm obviously not the only one). Just because you are paid doesn't mean you want to pass your life without perspective. This is basically someone sucking your life away without drive or mission and only compensating in money. And if there is any truth to the "Drive!" book, then the money is almost secondary to the other two factors.
- imtringued 5y ago
  No, if you straight up do "fun things" (watch movies or play video games) then you won't be motivated to work even when it's time for "boreout" to end. So you must do "work safe" activities that wont get you fired all day which is worse than doing boring work that lets you feel useful.
Spivak 5y ago
I’m so sorry that it got so bad for you. I recently quit my job because I was in that situation. I literally had nothing to do. I had maybe 8 hours of actual work a week. Paid really well to do basically nothing all things considered but it drained my soul. Being at home made it more tolerable but after cooking, baking, reading, side projects, getting my side hustle off the ground, exercising, starting an herb garden, taking up sketching, finishing my entertainment backlog, I don’t even know anymore I just couldn’t do it. There’s something so terribly draining about having so much “kinda free time” where I might have to do random tasks sporadically but is otherwise completely empty.

andrewzah 5y ago

This is simply not the case once you’ve been in that situation long enough. It’s pretty terrible. I would rather have lots of busywork than be sitting on my hands with nothing to do yet still have the obligation for the company. Working on something due to lack of work during a zoom meeting is entirely different than doing something in my own time when I have zero obligation to get called out of it at any moment. This prevents Deep Work from occurring. It’s thoroughly unsatisfying, and work is simply not just “time for money”. The shopping online etc that they’re referring to is being done out of boredom, not out of necessity. It’s a dopamine loop. Same with browsing social media or chatting online. Please don’t dismiss people and handwave when they’re trying to discuss issues.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
Would love to be in a situation like this. How do you find a job that lets you do nothing? I’d be happy to work on personal projects, learning new things, working a second job, etc
- tdfx 5y ago
  > working a second job This is the part I don't understand. If your job's expectations are so lax, why not potentially double your income?
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Well, these situations usually involve you having to be physically present and won't allow you to be out of office randomly for hours at a time. So that limits the kind of second job you could take. Also, many people work on fairly locked down computers with nothing much to do aside for (filtered) internet and random "corporate" apps. I'd be quite surprised to learn that in these kinds of situations, where people are required to be physically present to do nothing, they would be allowed to bring in their own computers and openly do private stuff.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  You have to account for what you're doing with your time and how it benefits the company and demonstrate that you're making progress. Unless you're better at managing a complex set of lies than most human beings, you're probably not going to succeed at it.

cwilkes 5y ago

The zero obligations is the gotcha here: you’re still responsible for making decisions based on the boring meetings that take up your entire day. And since people think they can fill up your calendar with meetings they do and then you’re only left with time outside of work think about mundane issues — which probably have some major consequences but who cares as you’ve sat through dozens of hours of meetings about it.

hrbf 5y ago

Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to it, I could finish a weeks’s worth of work in half a day. The rest was wasted time and waiting around. Plus, someone else controlled my time. I had to sit in my chair at my desk for eight hours, take a one hour lunch break in the middle of the city, never leaving the office otherwise. You have no control over the most important parts for the largest part of your waking day. You are asked to do meaningless busywork that wouldn’t need to be done at all if automated even in a half-assed way. There is zero reason for you to sit in the office all day, wasting hours upon hours except for your boss mandating it. 100% of the non-automated remaining parts of your job could be done remotely, by telephone and email. This crushes you eventually, depending on personality type sooner or later, especially when your mind is accustomed to tackling and solving problems. It grinds away at your sense of self, drains you of energy, it quite literally drives you slowly insane. You try not to think about it but you do. You try to read, surf the internet, stay in touch with others and do all the things you can do somewhat stealthy. Because when you eventually ask for more stuff to do, you get assigned to sorting contents of binders. Because, according to my boss at the time, “there’s always something to do”. Busywork. Got it. It makes you depressed, severely so. You realize that nothing you do matters at all and there’s no point to your job anyway. Every trivial task eventually becomes an immense burden that sometimes takes you days to complete, despite being a 30-minute task. In a way this means you have come full circle. You feel your mind rotting away. You feel that you have reached the end of your rope and this is what your life will be from now on. But if you raise your voice and speak up, all it earns you is the scorn of the boss and other (really bad) colleagues that want things to stay as they are. Some companies may well have an expectation of owning your time regardless of outcome and some people may well be cynical and empty enough to live with this situation, I for one would rather be dead. It took me four years and a nervous breakdown to finally throw the towel, with no regard for what happened to me afterwards. Yeah, quite a walk in the park those jobs are. Relaxing. Quite ideal.

sometimesokay 5y ago

I sometimes experience “boreout” on days where most of my team members are on holidays or when it’s a bit slow at work. However I still have to be “at the computer” even if I’m not doing anything. On the days I am bored, I don’t have motivation to even shop or cyberloaf. With remote work I literally touch my mouse, make sure my teams status is green, walk away and do something else at home. Sucks because I can never disconnect from work for the day. I wish we would advance quicker into performance based / tasks oriented work rather than just needing to be available.

stonecharioteer 5y ago

As others have said, being bored at work is extremely stressful. I am on the verge of leaving a company where I'm totally bored, for an early stage startup where I will be put to the grind. Oddly when I was in such a job before I had the energy to do other projects. I made the time. Now I have the time but it seems.... Meaningless. I am a developer who codes for fun as well, but in the last year I have not written any code worth talking about. My job is a joke because of how badly organized the company is. I went to therapy, tried to see if I had ADHD because I was slowly sinking back into my old habits of jumping between tasks and not prioritising work. Ultimately I decided I need to leave the company because it wasn't me. I was a bad cultural fit because I'm a person who does things for fun. Work was not fun. It was killing me.

billyruffian 5y ago

Boredom as a technique for pruning staff. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_electronics_firms/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/21/boredom_rooms_japan_e...