Originally found at Time, by Jamie Ducharme

If you’re waiting for brilliance to strike, try getting bored first. That’s the takeaway of a study published recently in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries, which found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity.

In the study, people who had gone through a boredom-inducing task — methodically sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one — later performed better on an idea-generating task than peers who first completed an interesting craft activity. (The task: to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.) The bored folks outperformed the artists both in terms of idea quantity and quality, as ranked by objective outsiders who assigned uniqueness scores to each one.

Continue reading original article at Time.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Discoveries

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Guihyun Park, Australian National University
• Beng-Chong Lim, Nanyang Technological University Singapore
• Hui Si Oh, Singapore Management University