I Do My Best Thinking in Grocery Store Lines (And Other Confessions of a Daydreamer)

Last Tuesday, I spent eleven minutes in the checkout line at Trader Joe's doing absolutely nothing. No phone check, no doomscrolling, no mentally drafting my grocery list (I'd already forgotten it anyway). I just stood there, watching a toddler negotiate for fruit snacks, letting my thoughts drift wherever they wanted.

By the time I got to the register, I had the opening paragraph of a short story I'd been stuck on for three weeks. It arrived uninvited, mid-boredom, like it had been waiting for me to shut up and listen.

This happens to me constantly, and I've stopped apologizing for it.

The Cult of the Optimized Minute

We live in a country that has turned every spare second into a productivity opportunity. Podcasts while walking. Audiobooks while showering (yes, waterproof speakers are a thing). Brain-boosting supplements between meetings. The implicit message: if your mind is idle, you're wasting it.

I bought into this for years. I timed my coffee brew against my morning email triage. I listened to writing podcasts on walks that were supposed to be walks. And weirdly, the more I optimized, the less I actually created. My output got thinner, more mechanical, more like everyone else's.

The turning point was embarrassingly small. My phone died on a three-hour Amtrak trip from New York to DC, and I'd left my book in my checked bag. I had nothing. So I stared out the window at New Jersey for two hours.

Somewhere around the Delaware Memorial Bridge, I solved a plot problem that had stumped me for a month. Then I had three more ideas. By Philadelphia, I was writing on a napkin I found crumpled in my coat pocket.

What Your Brain Does When You Stop Bossing It Around

Here's the part that made me feel less guilty about all this: the science backs it up. Researchers studying what's called the default mode network — the brain circuitry that lights up when you're NOT focused on a task — have found it's deeply involved in memory consolidation, imagining future scenarios, and connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. In other words, the literal machinery of creativity.

A 2019 study from the University of Central Lancashire (building on earlier work out of UC Santa Barbara) found that people who did a boring task before a creative exercise outperformed those who hadn't. Boredom, it turns out, is a launchpad, not a dead zone.

When you fill every gap with input — notifications, feeds, podcasts — you never give that network the floor. You're constantly feeding your brain other people's ideas and never letting it cook up its own.

My Unscientific Boredom Practice

I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've become a devoted practitioner of deliberate idleness. Here's what actually works for me:

• The phone-free walk. Twenty minutes around my Denver neighborhood with nothing in my ears. I keep a notes app open for when ideas strike, but I don't chase them. They usually come to me.
• The boring chore as incubator. Dishes, folding laundry, weeding. Repetitive physical tasks are idea factories. I've outlined entire essays over a sink full of suds.
• The waiting room rule. Any time I'm stuck waiting — line, lobby, airport gate — I don't reach for my phone for the first five minutes. Just sit. Look around. Let my mind wander into the corners it usually skips.
• The staring-out-the-window appointment. I literally schedule it. Fifteen minutes, a window, no agenda. It feels ridiculous and works anyway.

Permission Slip

If you take one thing from this essay, let it be this: your wandering mind isn't broken. It's not a liability to be managed. It's the reason you have ideas at all.

The next time you catch yourself staring into space, resist the reflex to fill the void. That space IS the void where creativity grows. Some of your best work is already in there, waiting for you to get bored enough to let it out.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go stand in line somewhere.