I used to think of boredom as a malfunction, a gap in the schedule to be filled as quickly as possible. A phone made this easy. Any pause, however brief, could be absorbed by something.
It took me an embarrassing number of years to notice that nearly every idea I have ever been glad of arrived in a gap. In the shower, on a long walk, in the queue for something I did not want. The mind, left alone, does not go blank. It goes to work.
What I do now
I leave the phone in another room for the first hour of the day. I walk without headphones one day a week. I try to say yes to the first twenty minutes of a delayed train.
None of this is productive, and that is the whole point. The part of me that is supposed to be productive has had plenty of time. The other part needs its own.
Boredom is what attention feels like when it is deciding where to go next.