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Manoush Zomorodi: Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Tech City. Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.

[MUSIC - Broke For Free: The Gold Lining]

Manoush Zomorodi: From WNYC, this is New Tech City, where Digital gets personal. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you are listening to challenge number four of Bored and Brilliant, our project that's getting us to put down our phones and jumpstart our creativity.

[phone vibrates]

[phone rings]

[phone vibrates]

Manoush Zomorodi: Today's challenge may end up being funny or scary for you, but hopefully it will also be relaxing.

[music]

Manoush Zomorodi: On day four, you're taking a fauxcation, as in faux, F-A-U-X, a pretend vacation. You're going to get a break from email, or texting, or whatever means of digital communication that you feel is the worst at interrupting you all day long. To take this faux or fake vacation, you'll craft an away message like, I don't know, I'm out, I'm taking an intensive sushi-making class, wasabi fingers, so no phone for me today. If you don't know exactly what to write, don't worry, we've got you covered. Just cut and paste from the samples that we've posted at newtechcity.org/bored. Some of them are kind of funny.

Speaker 3: It's not you, it's me.

Speaker 4: Actually, it's Twitter. It's definitely Twitter.

Speaker 5: Digitally detoxing in Tibet. Just kidding about the Tibet part.

Speaker 6: Hi, I'm experimenting with a new system. No email until 9:00 AM tomorrow.

Speaker 7: Lost my thumb in an intense thumb war. Cannot respond.

Speaker 8: Preparing the next generation to take over the world. I'm on a digital hiatus to spend a little more time with my family.

Speaker 9: Thanks for your patience.

Manoush Zomorodi: You can also post a message on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, wherever, saying that you're taking a break and then decide how long you need. An hour? All day? It's up to you. Then every time someone tries to contact you, they'll get the message. Their expectations are put on hold. 40% of you in our survey said the phone behavior you most want to change is the constant checking of your phone. Well, for this period, you can just stop. See how it feels.

When I tested out this challenge, I felt like I got some breathing room. I got relief from the pressure to read, respond, read, respond, read, respond. Okay, but maybe you're thinking, "Wait, what about work? People depend on me. I'm not a slacker." Well, there's evidence that you might even do your job better if you take the time to get bored. That boredom may beget success.

Maria Popova: We treat boredom as Ebola. It needs to be eradicated.

[laughs]

Speaker 11: That's true.

Maria Popova: With that goes away the capacity for stillness.

Manoush Zomorodi: Maria Popova is the founder of the literary website brainpickings.org, and you're hearing her at a little event we had here in New York City for Bored and Brilliant. Maria studies artists' creativity. She reads their diaries, their letters for clues, and then she applies what she's learned to herself.

Maria Popova: To me, it's been useful to really dial into my own sense of what is it that charges me and what is it that drains me. Spending time on the Internet, by and large, drains me. I do think that there's enormous value to immersive, prolonged contemplation.

Manoush Zomorodi: Prolonged contemplation, boredom, idleness, whatever they've called it. Maria says thinkers, going back to Aristotle, have identified the need for this moment of incubation for good ideas to sprout. Here's Maria quoting the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Maria Popova: Idleness. It may be said that everyone who lacks a sense of it thereby shows that he has not raised himself to the human level.

Manoush Zomorodi: Would Kierkegaard think we've become inhuman with our constant checking of email? Probably. Maria certainly believes the way we value hours put in over the quality of our work takes the joy out of living.

Maria Popova: Making it something to be accomplished as opposed to something to unfold organically. I think collectively we do that with everything, having this goal-oriented undertone to it. Boredom is the counterpoint to that. I hope that we can recultivate the tolerance for it, because that's where a lot of magical things happen.

[music]

Manoush Zomorodi: Maria Popova works for herself. Her website is paid for by donations. You might be thinking, "I have a boss. This vocation stuff is a frou-frou fantasy. Well, friends, I have a little story for you. Call this your fauxcation inspiration for office overachievers. 10 years ago, back when BlackBerries were still called Crackberries, the consultants at the Boston Consulting Group were ready to respond to any client request on a second's notice.

Matthew Krentz: They needed to have that BlackBerry by their nightstand. When it buzzed, they wake up.

Manoush Zomorodi: Matthew Krentz is a senior partner at BCG. He and the other bosses discovered that connectivity was really good in the short term, but not so much in the long term.

Matthew Krentz: We were finding that while we attracted people with great talent that were excited to join BCG, we were also losing them three, four, five years later when they found the life unsustainable.

Manoush Zomorodi: Krentz and BCG agreed to let Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow take a small team of their consultants to use as time management guinea pigs. Her drastic measure was mandatory tech-free relaxation. They called it PTO, which stands for predictability, teaming, and open communications, or predictable time off, depending on who you ask.

Matthew Krentz: Each team member had to pick a evening, a day where they turned off completely. They weren't allowed to check their email. They weren't allowed to respond to the team or the project leader.

Manoush Zomorodi: "They weren't allowed to respond." I love that. What happened was that team members talked to each other more face-to-face. They communicated better as a group because they had to be able to cover for each other during those mandatory offline periods. The other thing, when the consultants were unplugged, they said that they were having more big picture ideas instead of sweating the small stuff, like stressing over typing up meeting notes or perfecting the latest round of pie chart slides.

Matthew Krentz: These facilitated teams report a 75 to 85% higher likelihood that they will stay at BCG for the longer term.

Manoush Zomorodi: BCG was so happy with these results that now, 10 years later, the program is being used by thousands of teams in almost all of Boston Consulting Group's 78 offices around the world. In 2014, BCG was number three on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

[MUSIC - Broke For Free: Add And]

Manoush Zomorodi: Look, okay, maybe there's no way that your boss is going to let you go off the grid for an hour today. Maybe you can make an hour for yourself tonight. Write an email away message like, "I have the stomach flu. Talk to you tomorrow." Set it to auto reply for an hour tonight. Just enjoy being unreachable and then let us know how it goes. We are compiling all your feedback throughout this whole week at newtechcity.org/board.

All the auto reply templates we have, some super silly, some very serious, are also there. I'm in Bermuda for the rest of the day, so I won't be available, but I'll talk to you tomorrow for challenge number five. Rock on, Bored and Brilliant people. We're doing something big here. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is New Tech City and the Bored and Brilliant project.

[MUSIC - Broke For Free: Add And]

Manoush Zomorodi: Oh, my God. I haven't done this in so long. I'll be away from my precious, I mean, my smartphone for a couple of days to [unintelligible 00:09:13] doing detoxes. [laughs]

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