Boredom is the waiting room for ideas. Stop leaving the room every time it gets quiet.

Ideas tend to surface in unoccupied stretches, and those stretches have become easy to fill the second they appear. There is nothing wrong with filling them, except that it happens automatically, before anything has a chance to come up. The quiet is uncomfortable for about four minutes and useful after that.

Leave a few gaps alone this week. Waiting in a queue, walking somewhere familiar, sitting before sleep, and let the discomfort run its course instead of reaching for the nearest thing.