I'm curious to know more. Could you describe your environment and your actions in more detail?
Were you in a place with absolutely nothing to do or was there at least something to turn your attention to?
How did you spend that day -- were you, say, staring at a blank wall or lying on a sofa or walking around the room or something else?
And what was in your mind? Even if you accomplished nothing that day, did you perhaps think of some ideas on your topics of interest?
I was alone in a room of computers, and I had set out to take no positive action but grading homework. I ended up sitting and pacing and occasionally moving the mouse in the direction it would need to go next. What I remember of what my mind was on was the misery of the situation.
2I concur. The crux, for me, is whether or not I want to do the particular task.
If I want to do the task, say writing, but I'm not feeling motivated, then enough time being bored will eventually create for me the conditions to be more interested in writing than in staying bored.
If I do not want to do the task, say my taxes, then boredom or doing nothing may actually be preferable. In this case, boredom is not a sufficient motivator and I need to cognitively reframe how I'm thinking of the task and how to approach it. I wrote about this in a previous post, Facts vs Interpretations—An Exercise in Cognitive Reframing. Bludgeoning myself with normative "shoulds/oughts" is, in my opinion, a subpar coping mechanism compared to reframing my thoughts to better align with the task so that I'll want to do it.
There seems to be some variance in how deprivation affects creativity. I have a friend who will start hallucinating if she stares long enough at a white wall alone. Most people probably won't though, and would just experience some dull mind-wandering.
There's something going on with social deprivation and creativity. Monastic orders like Benedictine Christians and Zen Buddhists encourage long periods of silence, along with sensory deprivation like fasting, and it seems to work for them. If you have some kind of psychological discipline (innate or trained) to maintain your focus, you may enter a deep, undistracted flow state. But if you don't have that discipline, it's probably better to have some social stimulation so that you don't feel strained and uninspired from the lack of new social input.
1The pivotal time in my life where I finally broke out of my executive dysfunction and brain fog involved going to an area on campus that was completely abandoned over the summer with no technology, just a paper and pencil and a math book I was trying to get through while my wife was working on her experiments a building away (with my phone).
There wasn't even a clock there.
The first few days, I did a little work then slept (despite not being slee-deprived). Then I started adding some periodic exercise. Then I started bringing some self-help books and spent some time reading those as well. Eventually, I stopped napping and spent the whole time working, reading, or exercising.
It's not like I never went back to being unproductive for stretches of time after that summer, but I was never as bad as I was before that.
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was once locked in a room for three weeks until he completed one of his books.
Victor Hugo, when faced with a deadline for his book The Hunchback of Notre Dame, locked all his clothes away except for a large shawl. “Lacking any suitable clothing to go outdoors, [he] was no longer tempted to leave the house and get distracted. Staying inside and writing was his only option.” Six months later, the book was published.
Dozens of famous authors have done the same. Names like Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain—all of them constructed small writing sheds from which to work. Names like Ian Fleming, Maya Angelou, and George Orwell—the first two penned their novels while locked in hotel rooms, while Orwell isolated himself on a remote Scottish island to write.
One explanation for this reclusive behavior comes from author Neil Gaiman in an interview he did with Tim Ferriss a few years ago. Ferriss mentioned Gaiman’s most important rule for writing:
Gaiman, after a moment of reflection, responded by saying:
Writing is hard. Between writing or doing anything else, most writers—even some of the most accomplished ones—acquiesce to distraction. That’s why so many of them construct and work in environments devoid of external stimuli—the better to circumvent akrasia.
I do all my writing in coffee shops. Similar to Gaiman, I allow myself to do one of two things: write, or people-watch. I don’t bring anything with me except for a pencil, paper, and my research material housed in my journals. That means no phone, no laptop, and no watch (even knowing the time is a kind of distraction and pressure to perform).
Within this environment, I end up writing because I’ve made it the path of least resistance.