Why Your Phone is Stealing Your Best Ideas

The most creative moments you have in your life happened for you when you had absolutely nothing to do. Waiting in line, staring out the window during a boring meeting, laying in bed before you fell asleep. But these moments barely exist anymore, because the second you feel bored – you’ve trained your mind to reach for your phone. Boredom isn’t the absence of productivity though, it’s actually the birthplace of your best thinking – and filling every empty second with some stranger’s content is quietly suffocating your own creativity before it ever has the chance to take shape.

The case for needing unstructured thinking time has never been stronger, but it’s never been harder to get that unstructured thinking time. I want you to think for a moment about the last time you were bored, I mean truly bored. Other than being in situations we’d prefer to not be in, we don’t really have the option to be bored much anymore. Whenever we want to, we can watch Netflix, we can Facetime with our friends, and we can scroll TikTok. But if 98% of our conscious mind is focused on absorbing outside information, when are we able to have our own thoughts? 

Hustle culture has told us that we need to always be busy. But honestly, the people who I see working the hardest are actually accomplishing the least. They're posting content seven days a week with no strategy behind it. They're saying yes to every opportunity without asking if it actually moves the needle. They're so deep in the work that they never come up for air long enough to ask themselves if the work is even pointed in the right direction. It’s like if you’re creating a painting of a cat, but you never step back to actually look at it for a few moments. 

By the time you do, you realize that you screwed up 26 brush strokes ago, and now it feels impossible to reverse engineer where you went wrong. So you spin your wheels trying to figure out how to fix the left eye that just looks off – and your inability to slow down makes it even worse.  

This same issue can exist in our creative work. Whether it be the day-to-day business grind, building a creative career or developing a relationship with someone. You get your best ideas and your most informed perspectives when you’re doing nothing at all – and my goal with this piece is to help you to think about that a little more subjectively. 

Your brain needs blank space to connect the dots. When you’re not focused on anything specific, your brain activates what neuroscientists call the “default mode network” – the same system that’s responsible for daydreaming, self-reflection and creative problem–solving. So shower thoughts and long drive meditations.

This is where your most profound insights come from. Not from grinding harder until you burn yourself out, but from letting your mind wander without any meaningful inputs. Every time you pick up your phone or open up Netflix instead of sitting in silence, you’re shutting that system down before it can do its job. And no, this isn't just a theory – some of history's most celebrated thinkers understood this intuitively, long before neuroscience had a measurable explanation for it.

Everyone has a different way of gaining the insights provided to us from boredom. Einstein would famously pluck a violin mindlessly while performing his “thought experiments.” Steve Jobs became known for having regular “walking meetings” and Issac Newton developed his theory of gravity when a plague forced Cambridge to shut down. He was in a “contemplative mood” on his family’s estate – essentially experiencing forced boredom – when the apple tree observation happened.

Charles Darwin took three 45-minute walks every single day on the same gravel path near his home, kicking pebbles along the way while his mind worked through the problems that would eventually become the theory of evolution. Friedrich Nietzsche would walk alone for up to eight hours a day while writing – and actually wrote The Wanderer and His Shadow almost entirely on foot. These people didn't stumble into their breakthroughs by accident. They built boredom into their routine – and it rewarded them for it.

Your automatic tendency to consume an endless stream of random information is the enemy of your best creations. There’s a fundamental tension that occurs in taking in other people’s ideas versus generating your own. When you’re mindlessly and endlessly consuming podcasts, reels and articles – your brain remains in “reactive mode”. This means that it’s processing, not producing. The shift from consumer to creator doesn’t happen by adding more input. It happens by removing those inputs and giving yourself permission to think without being prompted to do so.

Remember when you were a kid, and you would get lost in a day dream? You would think about all the things you wanted to do, the places you wanted to see and the experiences that you longed for. When my brother and I were kids, our father would take us for long drives. On one of these drives, we were in the back seat – on the way home from the landfill.

We started talking about how cool it would be if there was a video game where you could do whatever you wanted – where you could drive cars around, talk to people, drive boats, fly helicopters – like a real life simulation, but it was a video game. The video game we were describing was called Grand Theft Auto. It was invented a few years later.

Now, imagine for a moment if my brother and I – we were actually video game designers and programmers in our early 20s. Had we been capable of acting on that shared daydream, then we would have become the creators of Grand Theft Auto. Everyone has an industry that they work in. Whatever it is, if you allow yourself to become bored, you will be gifted the best ideas of your career – and then all you need to do is to act on them. 

All things considered, I want you to think of boredom as a signal, not a problem. We’ve been conditioned by the technologies of modern society to believe that boredom is something you need to fix immediately. It feels uncomfortable, like we aren’t accomplishing anything and that we need to do something about it. But boredom is actually your subconscious telling you it’s ready to work on something profound.

Discomfort is the default setting that precedes every original thought you’ll ever have. Entrepreneurs, artists and deep thinkers who produce the most original work aren’t the ones consuming the most – waiting for the right inspiration to hit them to create something fresh. They’re actually the ones who have learned to sit in that gap and let something emerge for them. So, this is where your daily routines matter. You need to build space in your life for unstructured in-between time. This isn’t lazy, it’s strategic.

So, I want to leave you with one idea that has changed the way I live my life and approach my own creativity. I create content and share it on social media both for myself and for my clients for a living. But 2 months ago I deleted the Instagram, Facebook and YouTube apps off my phone. 

When I need to post something on socials, I use a desktop window or my work phone that’s always locked in some room far away from me. Now, when I’m standing in line – waiting for someone to meet me or just taking a break in between work sessions, I have taken away the option to reach for my phone to fill the silence. I’m forced to watch the traffic go by, to hear conversations go on around me, or to let my eyes go out of focus as I watch my dog sleep beside me. 

Everyone’s ability to practice self control is different, and for you – maybe you don’t need to take the social apps off your phone. Maybe you’re just able to not open Instagram whenever there’s a free moment to do so. But the point is to simply be aware of it. Why are you reaching for the distraction from your boredom? Is looking at the work of others actually inspiring you? Or is it just flooding your mind with anxiety and insignificance because you’re comparing your achievements to those of others?

The thing that you reach for to feel more connected and informed about the world is the very thing that’s disconnecting you from the best parts of your mind. Your best ideas aren’t hiding in someone else’s content or some TV show or a podcast – they’re waiting for you in the silence that you keep filling with random noise. The challenge isn’t to throw your phone away, delete all of your social apps and cancel your Netflix subscription – it’s to start noticing these moments I’m talking about and to just sit with them – instead of reaching what feels comfortable just to fill the space.

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All The Best,

Jay Ashcroft