In Pursuit of Boredom: Relearning How to Daydream

Published on: February 5, 2026

A while back, I asked my good friend and former manager Karli a question that had been sitting stubbornly in the back of my mind for weeks: "How often do you daydream?"

"All the time!" she said without hesitation. "Whenever I can."

I told her I don't daydream at all, which, as I heard myself say it out loud, made me unexpectedly sad.

The Optimizer's Mind

Here's what actually happens in my head during those in-between moments that other people apparently spend daydreaming: I'm planning. At the grocery store, I'm never browsing freely; I'm sequencing the most efficient path from ingredients to plated dinner, having long since memorized the store layout after my first visit. In the shower, instead of letting my mind drift, I'm mentally drafting talking points for tomorrow's meeting. While waiting in line (those precious idle seconds), I'm reorganizing my task list or mentally rehearsing how a conversation might unfold.

My mind operates as a remarkably effective project manager, but it turns out to be absolutely terrible at using idle time to just wander.

For years, I wore this tendency like a badge of honor. Efficiency! Productivity! No wasted mental space! But lately, I've started asking myself what exactly I'm optimizing myself out of. When Karli told me she daydreams whenever she can, I felt something I genuinely wasn't expecting: not just sorrow, but a small pang of envy.

The Creativity Gap

I'm a Design Manager at IBM, and I've been noticing something that makes me uncomfortable. When my peers talk about their "aha moments" or describe how a creative solution just "came to them" (as if delivered by some benevolent creative muse), I celebrate with them. But internally, I'm wondering: where's my well to draw from?

My strategic thinking feels derivative, like I'm remixing other people's greatest hits rather than composing my own. I'm also pursuing filmmaking on the side, but my scripts and screenplays sit half-finished in Google Docs, abandoned not for lack of time but for lack of...something. The kind of unexpected connection that emerges from a mind that knows how to wander off the beaten path and stumble onto interesting territory.

I've started to suspect that creativity isn't just about carving out time to think. It's about cultivating the right kind of thinking. The kind that doesn't arrive with an agenda or a to-do list, but the kind that might stumble onto something genuinely interesting precisely because it wasn't hunting for anything in particular. The kind of thinking I've systematically, methodically, efficiently optimized out of my entire life.

Filling Every Gap

Over the past two years since that conversation with Karli, I've become hyper-aware of just how aggressively I fill every scrap of empty space. There's always a podcast or song occupying my ears, always another cooking video queued up to recreate at home, always one more way to feed my brain information rather than simply allowing it to exist in its own company.

I've started experimenting with creating space, mostly by driving in silence to carve out both auditory and visual room for my mind to do whatever minds do when left to their own devices. But here's the uncomfortable truth: even when I successfully clear the space, I'm still remarkably bad at actually using it. I'll lie down with the explicit intention of letting my thoughts drift, and I either fall asleep immediately (which, to be fair, probably doesn't help that I've also been chronically sleep-deprived recently) or my brain just defaults right back to planning what I'm having for dinner.

It's like I've completely lost the muscle memory for mental wandering. Or, more likely, I never actually built it in the first place.

The Designer's Dilemma

This realization hits differently when I think about the nature of my work. We talk endlessly in design about innovation, creative problem-solving, and thinking differently. But how can I genuinely think differently when my brain only knows one operational mode: forward, efficient, relentlessly optimized?

I use AI extensively throughout my design process. It's helped me work faster, deliver more under what should be impossible timelines, synthesize research at a scale that would take weeks to do manually. But I'm starting to wonder if, in outsourcing all the tedious parts of thinking, I've also quietly outsourced some of the generative parts too. The parts where solutions don't arrive through linear problem-solving but emerge unexpectedly from unexpected places, the parts that seem to require boredom as a prerequisite condition.

Maybe that's why my design strategy consistently feels more tactical than visionary. I'm too busy planning my next move in careful, incremental pieces to ever step back far enough to see the bigger game unfolding.

The Pursuit

So I'm embarking on something that feels simultaneously simple and impossibly difficult: I'm pursuing boredom with the same deliberate intensity I've spent years applying to efficiency, which I realize feels counterintuitive.

I want to relearn how to daydream. To let my mind wander without a predetermined destination, to become genuinely okay with thoughts that don't immediately produce actionable next steps, and to create the actual conditions where creativity might have room to breathe instead of being suffocated by my relentless mental productivity.

I don't know if this experiment will make me a better designer. I don't know if it will help me finally finish those half-abandoned screenplays collecting digital dust. But I do know with increasing certainty that the alternative (continuing to optimize every single moment of potential mental downtime) isn't serving either the work I want to create or the person I'm trying to become.

Karli daydreams whenever she can. Two years after that conversation and a whole lot of turbulence in my personal life, I'm finally ready to learn how.

What I'm Trying

Here's my working hypothesis: daydreaming functions like any other skill, which means it can be deliberately practiced and, with enough repetition, relearned. Over the next few weeks, I'm experimenting with:

Creating true white space. Not just the absence of noise, but a genuine absence of input. No podcasts filling the silence, no music providing a soundtrack, no reflexive scrolling. Just unstructured time with no predetermined agenda. I'm becoming far more intentional about not occupying my mind with media simply because I have the technological ability to do so.

Resisting the urge to plan. When my mind automatically defaults to task sequencing (which it does, constantly, like breathing), I'm practicing gently redirecting it by asking "what if" instead of my usual "what's next." For all I know, this small shift in questioning could result in an unexpected adventure, a new dish that doesn't slavishly follow someone else's recipe, or an actual breakthrough with my screenwriting that doesn't come from forcing it.

Observing without capturing. Watching how the light changes across a wall as afternoon shifts into evening. Noticing small details without immediately reaching for my phone to photograph them. Letting moments exist fully in themselves without this compulsive need to document and share them, to turn every experience into content nobody asked for.

Embracing genuinely useless thoughts. Allowing my mind to follow whatever random tangents catch its attention. What would a grocery store designed specifically for Australian cattle dogs actually look like? How would you explain the concept of color to someone who's never experienced sight? Thoughts that serve absolutely no productive purpose except being interesting to think about.

Scheduled boredom. Ten deliberate minutes of lying down with zero intention of falling asleep. Just existing. Just being present. Seeing what bubbles up when there's genuinely nothing to do and nowhere to be.

I'll be honest: this feels uncomfortably, almost PAINFULLY unproductive, which is exactly what makes it necessary. The irony isn't lost on me that I'm approaching the practice of daydreaming with the same systematic intensity I bring to literally everything else in my life, which makes me chuckle. But maybe that's how someone like me has to start. You begin with a framework, a structure, a plan for how to stop planning, and then gradually, hopefully, that framework falls away. What's left is just space. The fertile, open-ended kind where interesting things have room to grow.

What's your relationship with boredom? Do you daydream easily, or are you also trying to relearn how?