The Art of Boredom

Have you ever found yourself instinctively reaching for your phone during a brief pause in your day? Maybe you're sitting in a doctor's office or waiting in line. In our hyperconnected world, we've lost touch with the simple art of doing nothing. Yet embracing moments of boredom can unlock creativity, enhance mental well being, and really help us reconnect with ourselves. Today we'll explore the science and culture behind boredom and how reclaiming it can enrich our lives. I'm Joe and my pal over there staring out the window, he's Kurt. And we are dudes in progress. Hello, Kurt.

Morning, Joe.

How you doing today?

I'm bored.

Yeah, me too. Just kind of sitting here, don't know what to do.

I hate being bored.

Do you?

I do.

When was the last time you were bored?

I think I have been on occasion over the last few weeks. For sure.

Yeah.

I don't have a lot, whole lot going on in the evening. That's probably the time. Or maybe on a weekend. Yeah, I don't have any big project going on right now. I remember I had my bathroom project and I was building something for my daughter. The other thing, it's wintertime too and I can't get outside as much as I want to. It's been icy and cold and horrible. So I think I've had a fair amount of boredom over the last few weeks.

A little stir crazy for sure. A little anxious about not moving on to the next big thing.

Yeah, definitely. So I'm really interested in this subject today because I'm not good at being bored.

I think there's kind of different levels of boredom. You have your long term where you've not done something in a few hours and you're getting kind of stir crazy or it's a Saturday afternoon and it's raining outside and there's no real projects to do around the house. And you don't worry, you don't feel like doing the projects around the house and you're just a little anxious and a little bored. And then there's the times that you're. For brief moments, like I said, you're sitting in a doctor's office or you're waiting in line. I think we've really lost that art of being bored. I know it's weird that I say the art of being bored, but I think because of our culture, because of our society, because of technology, we've lost that ability to just be bored. Do you remember being bored as a kid? Sometimes you hated it and. But it was kind of good for you.

I'VE always been a pretty active person. But I know what you're saying. There are times you say, mom, I'm bored. I like to sit there and watch people when I'm out in the public and notice how much they look at their phone. They can't stay away from. If they've got a minute where they're waiting in line for something or just hanging out, they're staring down at the phone.

Boredom is just seems like something we want to avoid at all costs. Whether we're in line, waiting for a friend, sitting in a doctor's office, or just sitting at home. What's the very first thing that we do? We grab our phone every single time.

And I'm having a hard time finding anything good on TV to watch right now. My football is over. My basketball team won two national championships and now they stink. So I don't want to watch them. Spring training started up for my Yankees, but, eh, that's not all that exciting. You get a little bit of information on what the team's going to be, but I don't really care watch those games. And I can't find anything on Netflix. So, yeah, you know, the thing that I've been going to is I'll get hooked into a video game that's taking up my boredom time.

When's the last time you, you let yourself stay bored? Maybe intentionally?

Never. Never. Yeah, I'm, I'm agitated. I notice it right away. That's funny because I have said it to myself. I don't think I said it out loud to my wife. I like doing outdoor activities and it's really been difficult to even do that.

We've conditioned ourselves to eliminate downtime. But I think boredom has real benefits. Kurt. And so I looked into it. I looked into this because for a long time, for the longest time, and I may have even mentioned it on this show, that we've lost the ability to be bored. We're just not bored anymore. We're not bored. Our kids aren't bored. We just don't hear that anymore. But I think boredom can have real benefits. So I wanted to dive into it a little bit today. Why we stop being bored. There's even some science around boredom. And how can we intentionally bring boredom back into our lives for the better?

I know one way to beat it, and that's curiosity, which I usually generally have. And I'm very curious in this topic. And I've heard you say this before, so I'm ready to learn.

Let's try to think back to a time before smartphones, before mobile phones, before all of that stimulation, before the Internet, maybe even before television, boredom was just part of life. People had to wait. They had to wait. They had to simply sit with their thoughts, I guess. I don't know when it came about, but industrialization came about, work became more structured, productivity was king. Right? Idleness started to feel like you're wasting your time or you're being wasteful.

Somehow the rat race was born also. You learn about that during this fun little attraction at Disney World called the Carousel of Progress that Walt Disney built for the World's Fair. And it goes through the years of progress. And there's at one point where he says, yeah, we got this thing called the rat race now, where we live out in the suburbs and we drive into the city for work, and then we drive right back with all the other rats, right? That takes up a lot of time.

Then came the 20th century. Here we are today. First came radio and television, and then later on the Internet. And by the time smartphones came about, boredom is now practically extinct. And now we have this weird intolerance for it. I'll speak for myself here. Even if it's a few seconds, I'm grabbing my cell phone, I'm looking something up on the Internet or whatever it might be, turning a podcast on, checking email, scrolling social media, anything to fill that weird void that we're no longer comfortable with.

You got another big one. You do a lot for hours. You chat with ChatGPT.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have. You have an invisible friend now.

You have this invisible friend in this, in the phone, along the computer that. That does what you tell it to do, doesn't talk back unless you tell it to talk back, does exactly what you ask it to do. I mean, it's just. Yeah, it's a weird. And it's going to get. It's going to get more weird, Kurt. AI is going to get more weird. It's going to get more social. I guess you would say we're in for some interesting times with AI coming about. I've always, you know, whenever I use ChatGPT or any kind of AI Kurt, I always use like, please and thank you and I appreciate it, good job, all that stuff. And I think the biggest reason I do it is because one day it's going to remember how I treated it when it was young, and it'll look at me as one of the nice ones, one of the good guys.

You're definitely losing it. I'm getting worried about you, Joe. Remember when we were kids, one time, I was always really bored as a kid when my parents wanted to go visit their friends and spend the afternoon talking. Now that was boring, but that's what people did. They would even. I remember my mother saying that her grandmother always had a cake for whenever people came over to just chat and have coffee. People did that. We don't do that anymore.

I remember being a kid standing in line at the bank with my mother being so bored that I just could not stand up. And so I don't know how old I was, but I was young enough to be dragged, if dragged is the right word, or drug. Because I remember being so bored that I just couldn't hold myself up. And she's pulling me as I'm. And you have that linoleum floor, right? And she's pulling me along that linoleum floor through the ropes and jerking my arm, making it. You know, Every once in a while I'd get a jerk from her because she wanted to impose some pain on me for acting up.

Parents didn't care back in that day how they acted in front of other people with their kids.

Here's the thing, Kurt. Boredom hasn't always been a bad thing. The ancient Greeks had this idea called skola, which essentially was leisure time for deep thinking. Then we had the Renaissance. And idleness was kind of a double edged sword. Some saw it as laziness, while others saw it as time for contemplation and thinking and creativity. And then came the 19th century. Boredom was actually a privilege. The aristocracy had the luxury of being bored while the working class didn't. Now here we are completely the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Everyone now is expected to be productive. 24, 7. Boredom is just seen as a waste of time now that downtime, that time to think and contemplate and daydream, right? When's the last time you daydreamed? Just sat and looked out a window and let your thoughts just kind of flow away.

I put some effort into it and it's usually during my morning routine. So I think that if I've done anything right, reinvigorating the morning routine. And part of the. More of it could be just daydreaming, visualization, those kinds of things. So I definitely value it more. But it's still not easy.

It is all about the technology and the distractions that we've let into our life. You talked before about not being able to find anything on TV to watch, first of all, that you have this urge to find something on TV to Watch. I think when books were made public, like the printing press made books cheap and they were widely available to most people, people worried about that, that people just want to spend all their time with their noses stuck in books. Right now we would kill for that leisure. But we can bring that kind of leisure back into our lives. That kind of. If you're entertaining yourself with a book, it's not necessarily boredom, but I think you understand my thought. We've just not let ourselves have downtime. Just daydreaming. Downtime. Again, I brought up this example, but next time you go to a doctor's office or you're waiting to get your hair cut or whatever it might be, look at everybody. You mentioned it before. They're all on their phones. Is anybody just sitting there staring off into space? In fact, if somebody is just sitting there staring off into space and not looking at their phone, you're probably looking at. At them in a creepy way. Who's that weirdo? Just staring off into space. You might pick up a magazine and leaf through it. I remember looking at the highlights magazine at the dentist office when I was a kid. You might pick up a magazine and leaf through it, but you're just bored. And you sat with it and you let it happen. You didn't even let it happen. It just was. Right now we have to be more intentional about it. There's this study in computers and human behavior that how often people instinctively check their phones. Not because they need to, not because they're waiting on a call or they think they got a message. But it's something to do to break the boredom. Just pick up the phone, seeing if something was there. Did you ever see King of Queens?

Oh yeah, I love that.

The show, King of Queens.

Kevin James is hilarious. He's got great stand up too.

He's absolutely hilarious. But my favorite character on there is the dad, no doubt, Arthur. Okay. I remember one time Arthur got himself a cell phone and he's waiting for somebody to call him on his cell phone and he. He's sitting there at a restaurant and he looks down at it and he puts it down and he picks it back up to see if anybody's called. And he lifts up the antenna. It tells you how far back that is. He pulls out the antenna just to make sure there's a connection and nothing. And then I think somebody at the restaurant did that little ding bell. You know that when you're waiting for something or you need the server to come and you're sitting at the counter and you hit that Little round bell, the ding bell. He thought that was his phone, so he jumped on his phone. That was Arthur's introduction into no longer being bored. But we do. We instinctively check our phones. We instinctively go to Netflix or some streaming service to break the boredom. The problem with that is instead of allowing our minds and our thoughts just to wander, we're overstimulated. And we know we're overstimulated. I don't want to mix this up with mindfulness. And I started to go down that path a little bit. But we've talked a lot about mindfulness. This is different. You can be intentional about boredom, but also, I think it's important to let boredom happen. When the occasion arises, just let it happen. We're all conditioned to be engaged in something all the time. It's less space for just unstructured thought and creativity and really deep thinking.

So you're saying if I have a night off, I should relish it instead of being upset with myself? I got nothing going on for a little while. Okay.

Now, if you're sitting there for days at a time just staring off at.

The wall, you know, I don't see that happening.

Probably need to do a wellness check on you.

But.

How do we embrace boredom? The simplest answer to that is just to let it happen. Just to let it happen. Resist the urge to check our phones, to turn the TV on. Resist that urge. Like I said, when you're in the waiting room standing in line, just let yourself be. Look around. Observe. Let your mind wander.

This is very timely. I'm going to be doing that this morning.

I think we talked about this a few episodes. A few episodes early earlier on. On the test. We all need to get right. We don't have to go down that road.

The test that we gotta get. Yes. I am doing one of the tests. We don't. We should get today.

Right.

I could be in a doctor's office for a while. Why does it take them so long?

Yeah.

Why do you always have to wait in the doctor's office?

That's right. That's right.

They don't seem to be very.

Concerned with your boredom.

Right? That's right.

At all. They're not at all.

They're in no rush whatsoever. It seems like when you're in the.

Doctor'S office today, let yourself be bored. Now, you may be a little anxious about this procedure, but just let yourself be bored. Don't go for your phone. Just let your mind wander. Let me ask you this, and this is me asking myself as well. When's the last time that I walked to go do something. Your home may not be in a place that you can walk to, anything close. But I can go shopping within a mile of my home. I could walk to the grocery store. I could really walk to go get my hair cut. I live in suburban Cincinnati, and we have a major area near me that I could easily walk to and go do that stuff. But I get in the car because I don't want to put the energy in. I don't want to take the time. But when's the last time I just walked. Walked someplace, and that's a part of experiencing boredom as well. Don't bring podcasts, don't bring music, just your thoughts.

Yeah, I like that idea. I'm a couple miles away. I can get to a Target, Home Depot, a couple miles away, even Walmart. A lot of hills, though. Yeah. Can be a little strenuous.

Yeah. Don't overdo it. But take it. Take it a little. Little step at a time. Right.

I usually go on a pretty long walk on a Sunday morning, but the stores might not be open yet. So, you know what I'll do is I'll walk over to a car dealership and I'll just look through the cars. Just because there's a Jeep, Chevy, GMC dealership in walking, I'll do that a lot. On a Sunday.

Sure.

Just my thing. It's a longer walk, but I'm kind of accomplishing something. I'm kind of looking at the prices and being shocked.

There's two kind of strategies that we're talking about here. One of them is letting boredom happen. When it comes when you're at the doctor's office or when you're feeling bored, just let it happen. And then there's room for structured. I mean, scheduling unstructured time, maybe blocking out parts of your day a couple times a week where you just sit and let your mind wander. I know that seems weird, but if we're going to claw back this sense of downtime, this sense of letting your mind wander, if we're going to try to claw some of that back, we have to be intentional about it. I don't want to have to be intentional about everything, though. Kurt. I think the most important thing to do about boredom is just to let it happen.

When you say let it happen, what I'm thinking to myself is, be okay with it. Yeah, if it's happening, just be okay with it. Don't fight it. Really, what I'm. The sense I'm getting from you and what I need to do. And I can do this. Fortunately, working from home, noontime, I can go over and lay in my bed and for 30 minutes just do nothing.

Yeah.

Be with my thoughts.

Yeah.

And that is. It is very rejuvenating to do that for sure.

You know, when. When I opened up the show and I said, my friend over there looking out the window, staring out the window, that is something that we don't do enough of is daydream. When's the last time I daydreamed? Gosh. What I mean by that is just sitting there, staring off into space, letting one thought go to the next. Maybe you're looking up at the sky, at the clouds, and you're figuring out the faces or the shapes it's making, but just letting your mind drift, it can really. I know this for a fact. It can lead to some real unexpected insights. We talked about Matthew Kelly's book Fourth Quarter, and I dug a little deeper into the classroom of silence than he did in the fourth Quarter. He goes really deep into it with the rhythm of life. But letting your mind drift can really give some unexpected insight, some unexpected creative paths that you don't even know is in you staring out the window. Daydreaming might actually be good for us.

Yeah, I like that question. What if from some of the reading we did.

Yeah.

What if there's a great question to contemplate in your boredom, Right.

That is a good question. But you can't just go for your phone, even avoid the magazines at the doctor's office. Just let yourself sit there and stare. Or if you're sitting in traffic and you feel the urge to turn on the radio or turn on a podcast, just let yourself sit there. Now don't let your. If you find yourself, you especially, Kurt, if you find yourself with your head about to explode because the person in front of you is not filling the gap or not going fast enough then. Or cut you off, then maybe, maybe that's a time for distracting distraction. But for the most part, for the most part, just let yourself stare out the window and see what happens. See what your see where your mind takes you. I really think that we've lost this. This art of boredom. We've lost the ability to be bored. We can do some intentional things, designating boredom friendly times when, like first thing in the morning or before going to bed. And that's all part of our maybe mindfulness meditation or morning routines or evening routines. But I think the most effective thing is let boredom happen. When it happens, be comfortable with it as Much as you can see where it takes you. Let yourself be bored.

I like that you're giving me permission to be bored. I think our culture does not give us permission to be bored because it is a constant rat race.

So what's our takeaway here, Kurt? Boredom's not a problem. I don't want to necessarily call it a skill, but it is something that we can reclaim that art of being bored. Just let ourselves be bored. I do believe it can lead to greater creativity, reduced to stress, mental clarity. There's so much to it. Let yourself have those down times. You're working with your brain, right? You're letting your brain do its thing, letting your imagination do its thing, letting your creativity do its thing, and just staring off into space. Let's try to be intentional about recognizing when we're bored and just letting it happen.

I think I've learned a lot from this in that, first of all, this is a good thing. I don't have to feel guilty. I can give myself permission. If it's happening, I didn't expect it, that's fine. And I can be productive with creativity and ideas and thoughts. That could be something amazing that will bring some kind of enjoyment. I'm thinking about, hey, what's my next vacation?

Yeah, yeah.

Where am I going next? I don't have anything planned. Let's marinate on that for a little while. All by myself? Yeah. I like this idea, Joe. And I don't know, I didn't realize I was guilty about being bored, but I am. And maybe you've cured me of that.

It's not necessarily about feeling guilty. It's about just letting it happen. Right? It's okay. We need to give ourselves permission just to be bored. There's a couple things that I've done intentionally with my phone. I'm probably at 80% that I do this. And I know I've probably talked about it here before, but it's worth. It's worth reviewing. First of all, I stopped taking my phone into restaurants unless the phone is a critical part of that time, Right? Like if I'm meeting with somebody and I'm waiting for them to say, hey, I'm here, or whatever it might be, or there's information on the phone that I need for a lunch meeting. But if I'm going to have dinner or lunch or breakfast with my wife or with friends, I leave my phone in the car. Now, if you're with friends, you're not bored. But I even do this. I even started doing this when I'm eating by myself. And I do that a lot when I'm traveling. I go to a restaurant by myself and just let myself eat my dinner and sit there and be bored. So I've stopped taking my cell phone into restaurants. I stopped taking it into church because I want to experience the moment there in church. I stopped taking it next to my bed, putting it next to my bed. And again, I'm about 80% on these things. This is part of me just letting myself be bored and not going to my phone for every. Every little stimulation that I need. So let's try to be bored today. How about that?

This is a good day for me to practice this, Joe, in so many ways, which I won't go into right now. Hey, this was a great episode. Thanks so much. I needed this. The timing is perfect, and it's something I have an issue with, and I. I want to do better. So thanks for covering this, and I feel much better about any boredom I got coming up anytime soon. Y. I don't have a lot going on this weekend, so it's a good time to practice, too.

What is your win for the week?

My win for the week. So one of my goals at work, and even in my podcasting and business ventures, no surprise, is to learn more about AI in so many different ways. Artificial intelligence. So I attended two learning sessions on AI at work over the last week. One was Microsoft's Copilot Studio. And this is a tool where you can build your own chatbots, no code. And it's quite powerful. And it's technology that's just being released into our company for us to use, anyone to use. It's part of our Office 365 suite. And they're. They're building it into all the products even. It's kind of interesting. It's really taking over, I think, search to where you can chat with a chatbot. And that chatbot is connected to like, Word documents and Excel documents, PDFs, even images and text that you connected to through your SharePoint libraries. That's kind of like a storage area where you put all these. All these documents, and it uses that as its content to answer questions for that you build as a chatbot. Pretty simple to set up a simple use case, but lots of connectivity to all kinds of data sources that you can do too. So really cool. Get started to learn that one. And then I had a. Another session. I watched a use case of a team who built some things in Amazon Web Services. There's a product there called Bedrock that I need to learn and the use case they had was perfect. There's a group that's building kind of templates for this so that we can use it in a project. I got coming up, got very excited about that, talked to the architect that's responsible for my team, and we're going to start doing some meetings and start moving forward with that. So that's really exciting. And I want a kind of simple thing, but I hadn't thought about this before. I think you'd like this one, Joe. I had a meeting last week. I'm starting to do a codathon preparation. We do this annual codathon at work where we give a group of developers 24 hours to come up with a business solution, a software product to kind of prototype and get it started, something that's of value. And we do incorporate AI into that. But during the first session, as we're getting ready to prepare this for this year, someone said, you know, we're asking all of our attendees to use AI in their solutions. Why don't we try to use AI in our prep for this code? A thon that we got coming out. I think they're called a hackathon this year, but either way. And I. I was thinking through that, and I'm responsible for the registration. I built an application that helps our teams register for the event, put their teams together. But last year I did a survey through Microsoft Forms. They have a nice little product where you can collect the survey. I had 90 participants in the survey, which was really good because I think we just had just over 200 people. And I had the ability to export that into Excel, all the responses. And I went into ChatGPT. Oh, it's copilot Studio, which is really. The engine is chatgpt. And I asked it if it could do this, look at this spreadsheet and analyze the responses from our participants last year. And it was okay. And then I said, you know what? Can you give me a better prompt to do this? And it gave me this really almost like three or four paragraphs of a prompt. But some of the fascinating things, the results of that was that it looked through all the responses and it gave me a summary of what kind of the pulse and the main things were right at the top. It tried to do some graphing and that kind of thing, but I don't think that actually worked, which I didn't try to research at all. But it also gave some percentages of where things fell. We were looking at things of how did the registration go? How was the challenge? What did you think of the event? All in all, but definitely at the very end, which is really great. It gave us actionable items, things that we can improve for our next event. All summarized, you know, in seconds. And there's going to be a meeting. I'm going to miss the meeting today. But there I gave my team those responses and they can discuss them in today's meeting. All summarized.

Wow.

So that was a lot AI stuff this week.

AI is super powerful, man. AI super powerful. You talk about chatbots and, and there's been times that I'm chatting with a customer service. Yeah, chat. And it says connecting, connecting. And you wait for a few seconds as you're sitting there bored, waiting it for it to connect to a customer service rep and you're talking to the customer service rep and all of a sudden their answer, you look at their answer and like, oh, this is AI. And even, even me, who I'm fairly astute with with AI and chat, GPT and that whole process, I get fooled every once in a while thinking, oh wow, this is AI, you know, because they, it's, it's, it's getting really good and I'm, and I'm completely comfortable with it. I don't care if I'm getting the answer I want if it comes from a computer. I'm still saying please and thank you and I appreciate your help and all that other stuff.

So one other example that just popped in my head, I'm trying to blog more at work on content that I discover that's new again. I track SharePoint, for instance. I found a blog that the SharePoint developers put out, talking about the new features that are being released. I know there's a, there's a tremendous amount of content that comes in terms of what they are releasing for the entire office365, which is quite overwhelming. We review that every week the best we can as a team. But I found one that was really good of a. A particular component that anybody could use in their building their news posts and building their pages, web pages. And I asked Chat GPT to read this blog post and give and create a blog for me that's not exactly like this one. Then I asked a couple more questions. There was one thing, I said, what else, what's missing in this post that I could add to it? And I also, the other thing I added to it. So I got all that response back. I put it together, put some of my own words in there. It didn't change a lot. It cut down the time of me creating this blog post so, so fast because a lot of the main points that are bullet points, I mean, how else am I going to reset, restate those? But then I just built some, these little web parts. The way that this new thing worked and I had examples in my post, I mean, maybe it took me an hour to do the whole thing. I don't know. I forgot about all this stuff that I'm doing. But it is, it's a big goal. It's going to be one of my work goals. We're starting to do those for work and learning AI and applying it in our. And that is something the entire organization is asking everyone to do. And that's what we've heard. I've listened to some podcasts in the industry. In business today, we've got all these tools. Not everyone is really using them and getting productivity out of them yet. But this year is going to be a big move in that direction.

You have two types of people when new tools come about, right. You have the person that embraces it and lets it happen.

It's after.

Right? Yeah, Lets that. Lets and understands that, you know, it makes mistakes. And then you have the person that they're forced to try it. And the second it doesn't work exactly perfectly, they rail on it. Ah, this I know. I knew this thing wouldn't work. This is terrible. I'm not getting them. I just need to go back to my typewriter, my manila folders and my typewriters. What I need to do anyway. Well, good stuff, that's all. Anytime we can talk about AI is good stuff for me, man. And there's a little AI in my win for the week. I made some real strides in implementing some systems with the support of AI to support my coaching business. It's really going to allow me to serve my clients more effectively, Kurt, because it's going to cut down a lot of prep time, cut down on a lot of note taking and organizing. And I've put some really good systems in place and their systems are just that, they're a work in progress. They're just designed. It's just designed to make things more efficient, easier, predictable. But I made some great strides, especially last Saturday afternoon and putting some, some solid systems in place, and there'll be some tweaking involved, but it's really going to help me support my clients better and help me be more effective.

So we were talking about this on our Saturday morning meet last week, so we were trying things out live. You were trying some things out on us. And I know I see your resource is one of them, which I like changing up my. My systems, and if I've had some issues with some things, I'm always out there looking. So I really appreciate that work that you do, Joe, and I'm probably. I. I've incorporated one of yours. I don't think I even told you Auphonic in my podcasting. Oh, yeah, I've had some problems with audio, with the descript I've been using, which I need to write to them. I'm getting like a little. A little buzzing sound that I don't think is my background noise, and I feel like it's showed up more recently than I've ever heard it before. And come to find out, I had some credits still on Auphanic, and I've been using that to clean it up. And you were. Thank you for suggesting that tool that we've used for several years, off and on.

I like it. I like Auphonic a lot. How about your resource for the week?

I had a project that I talked about. I think I'm excited. My win for a week, I think, was the branding project that we did, and one of my colleagues, we have a really fun program at work where it's a beautiful system and program that you go in and you can thank someone for the work that they did for you or with you. And I got a $50Amazon gift certificate from that program. So it's not just a thank you program, but you can have a little monetary thank you as part of that program. And I was interested in getting some headphones for my gaming, which I got. I got a wireless, cheap set of wireless headset that's working pretty good. And then I had seen this on the Today show. My wife watches it pretty religiously every morning I was walking by, this woman was demonstrating some of the tech gadgets out there. And I love speakers. And she had a magnetic Bluetooth speaker. And you know, if you have that little ring on your phone case that's magnetic. This little speaker, Joe, will stick right on the back of your phone and act. And I'm showing you, I'm showing you, but it will stick there. And it's 5 watts, so it gives a pretty decent sound. And if you want to put your phone up on your desk, it'll prop it up, too. But it's a Bluetooth speaker. If I turn it on. This one also has a little neon light that goes on.

What fun.

So I bought two of those. They were like $25 for two of them.

That's cheap, man.

I put a link to the one that I bought. There's several of them out there. You can check them out. The one thing I bought, too, I thought I might set them up as stereo through the Bluetooth. They're using Bluetooth 5.3, but unfortunately I thought that they would, but they don't. So there's some out there. If you bought two, you might even set up a little stereo for yourself.

I've seen some small, little Bluetooth speakers where the audio clarity is really incredible. You're like, man, where'd this technology come from?

Oh, I know.

It's pretty.

It's pretty amazing. I stuck one on my refrigerator downstairs, and I was having trouble with my radio. A lot of times when I make my lunch, I play the talk show, local talk show, and now I can just hook it up to my phone and play that. It sounds very clear, it's very good, and it's good for music. Bring it in the shower. It's even waterproof.

My resource is connected to my win for the week. Recently I discovered Google Meet. Now, Google Meet's been around for a long time. Google has a. Has a service called Google Workspace. And with Google Workspace, you get enhanced benefits. With Google Meet, you get enhanced benefits with the Google Suite and get some other nice things. But one thing on my coaching calls that I really like is the ability to record the call and have it transcribed so I can go back and pull out the highlights and take notes and. And really create a strategy from the transcript. And what that does is it helps me to really be in the moment instead of worrying about taking notes and writing that down and capturing that. And it helps me to really be in the moment. So if you have a business that requires meetings and you need to get important information from those meetings, look at Google Workspace. Specifically, look at Google Meet with video recording and transcribing. It's a powerful tool. It's a powerful tool and I'm really liking it a lot.

I'm seriously considering swapping out my backup recording software. So I use Descript, and we're using SquadCast right now. That's part of Descript. And I've been comparing features myself, Joe, from our conversations on Google Meet. And the great thing I like about Google Meet compared to what we've been using. Also on Saturdays, there's a company called WhereBy. WhereBy.com, very inexpensive. It's like eight bucks a month. I think we pay for the pro version. But Google Meet, I think, is it like $10 and you get all these other benefits including storage space is what I'm looking at. I don't have a lot of backup storage space and I'm really interested because of the extra things that are there and if it'll meet my backup and if it'll allow my guests to get into our show easily. That has always been a requirement of ours that they can be a non technical person and be able to connect. And I've had so many problems, didn't matter what platform I'm using. We had a problem this morning. Like I have more audio problems either myself or the guests it seems like. But anyway, so I don't know that you can ever stop any of all that because a lot of it's on the end users side of things.

But the nice thing about Google Meet is you can just send them a link and I think they have to be using Chrome or. But even, even Edge uses the Chrome framework so I think it'll work on Edge but just send them the link. They click on the link. Done.

Well, I told you the Mac, if they're using Safari, it's probably going to want to download the Meat. Yeah, the Meat yeah. App to do it.

Yeah.

Or if you're on a mobile, you're on a mobile device, it may want you to do a try on an iPhone for sure it's going to want to install the app.

So there might be some experimenting to go on there and we'll see. But so far it's meeting my needs swimmingly and I've made that switch.

Did you use that in any of your client meets yet?

I have started this week and last week I started using it and captures it wonderfully. Right. Depending on the length of the call. I had one coaching call last night and that lasted about an hour or so and I think within an hour and a half or two hours I had the, the whole video and the transcription downloaded into my Google Drive and ready to go. So it's pretty powerful. It's pretty neat, man. I like it. I like it a lot. How about your quote? We'll wrap up with the quotes and get moving.

Boredom is useful to me when I notice it and think, oh I'm bored, there must be something else I would want to be doing. Boredom acts as an initiator of originality by pushing me into new activities or new thoughts.

Hugh Prather, Awesome.

I don't know. I don't know who he is, but I like that quote.

I like that, I like that. Yeah, yeah.

Very similar to what you talked about. Embrace that Boredom. And then think of it as a time that might bring on some new activities and new thoughts into your head.

My quote comes from Blaise Pascal, apparently. Some French guy, I'm assuming. But I like the quote a lot. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Wow. That's pretty powerful statement.

Yeah. Now, it may seem a little over the top, right? All of humanity's problems. But if. If we really think about it, literally and figuratively, how many of our problems, how many of our issues could be solved just by taking a moment and thinking it through and being alone? And let your creative juices flow and let that. Just let that happen. Right? I do like that. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

I was thinking of all the people in history have caused problems. I wish they were just sitting at home alone.

That's right.

That's right. That's what I was thinking. That's funny why they got caused so many problems.

Can't you just go read a book, dude?

You really got to conquer the world, dude.

Let's wrap up right there. Our website is dudesinprogress.com dudesinprogress.com if you want to email us, you can certainly do that. Dudesudsinprogress.com Remember, boredom is a thing, right? Let's embrace it. Let's embrace it, man. Life doesn't have to be engaging and imperfect all the time. In fact, I think being bored is making progress. It's making progress in mental clarity, creativity, and being a better human being. So progress is better than perfection. Just keep moving forward. Dude.

I think I heard somewhere you can make a lot of progress by just slowing down.

There you go. All right, man, talk to you soon. See ya.