Feeling bored at work is a common complaint. A large percentage of employees feel bored at least occasionally, and some feel bored much of the time. Boredom is reported by those in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Boredom has not been studied extensively, but it has attracted some attention from scholars in diverse disciplines, including human factors engineering, psychiatry, sociology, education, criminology, and industrial psychology.

Definitions of Boredom

Most scholars would agree that boredom is an emotion, an unpleasant transient state. Boredom is felt when the current activity fails to capture and hold the performer’s attention, or it takes conscious and continuous effort to sustain attention, or the performer is acutely aware of wishing to direct attention elsewhere. Bored individuals often feel that time is passing very ...

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