Don’t dread tedious workplace assignments like reading reports or sitting through meetings — they’re making you more productive.

Boring, monotonous tasks help you become a better problem-solver, new research finds, because our brains use that unstimulating “down time” to branch out and think in more creative ways.  

“Boredom has always had such bad press, but some boredom is possibly good... especially if it gives us the opportunity to daydream,” said Sandi Mann, senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. Mann's research was presented this week at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology.

“Being able to have that down time when you let your mind wander can be great for creativity,” Mann said.

Americans are getting less creative overall, according to a landmark 2010 study. Kyung-Hee Kim, an associate professor at the college of William & Mary’s School of Education, analyzed results from creativity tests and found that our creativity has been on the wane for more than 20 years now, even though IQ scores are climbing.

Experts say one reason for our collective dearth of creativity is the increased stimulation we get in our everyday lives: We can watch Netflix while we wait for a bus and play Angry Birds when we're stuck in a checkout line.

No one likes being bored, but it's a mental state we shouldn't be so quick to eliminate. The reason we get bored is that our brains don’t have enough neural stimulation, Mann said, and the act of daydreaming is the mind’s attempt to self-stimulate.

Related story: Meetings can make you, uh, stupid

Subjects in Mann’s experiments who were assigned boring tasks, like reading or copying down phone book entries, performed better on a subsequent creative task — coming up with as many different uses for two Styrofoam coffee cups as they could — than those in a control group.

Reading something boring increased creativity more than writing something boring, Mann found. She theorized that the more passive nature of reading lent itself better to daydreaming.

“Once we’re allowed to daydream, our heads are free to think in different ways,” Mann said, which leads to more creative problem-solving.

But your boss might not see it that way. “In the workplace, daydreaming is not considered a positive,” said executive coach Lisa Garcia Jacobson. You can’t stare off into space at meetings or otherwise visibly display your boredom. “[You] have to practice it in a focused way,” Jacobson said.

If you’re trying to solve a problem at work, spend some time on a task that doesn’t require much concentration, skip the audiobook on your ride home or take a short walk (and leave the smartphone behind) to alleviate a cognitive logjam, Mann suggested. “Definitely, if you’re looking for a solution to something, giving yourself the opportunity to let your mind wander a bit will probably help,” she said.

Another thing that could bring you to a solution faster: Cut out the multitasking, Jacobson said. Studies have shown that when you try to focus on too many things at once, they all get the short shrift.

Focusing on the task at hand, even if it’s mind-numbing, is a better alternative. You’ll get the job done more effectively, and if a part of your mind does start to wander, those unscripted thoughts could be the key to solving your next workplace challenge.

DST and daylight savings were trending Monday on Twitter, and the theme of many of the tweets had to do with workers’ difficulties adjusting to the time switcheroo.

“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day.

Many employees are feeling out of sorts and tired because the clocks have sprung ahead an hour, and that’s going to impact productivity; as witnessed by the plethora of workers spending time tweeting about their hatred of DST instead of working.

Making matters worse is the commencement of office pools this week for March Madness, the NCAA Men’s division basketball championship, that is also expected to be an employee time sink.

It’s the perfect storm of non-productivity.

A recent study by Penn State released found that daylight savings leads to more workers slacking off.

The time switch results in a loss of sleep and an uptick in web surfing, maintained D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Ferris, along with other researchers, looked at six years of Google data and found that tired employees are more apt to make bad decisions.

“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.

March Madness will likely contribute to the problem. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., predicted the basketball fever could attract more than 2.5 million visitors on the web per day, and each spending 90 minutes watching the games.

While John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, said the slacking off wouldn’t bring the economy down, he did estimate it could cost employers about $175 million in the first two full days of the basketball tournament.

“Monday could be particularly dreadful on the productivity front,” he noted.

Beyond March Madness and DST, there may be a general falling off of worker efficiency going on the United States.

A Wall Street Journal story Monday reported that Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has found the productivity spike in 2009  after mass layoffs that made employees fearful of losing their jobs has fallen off. He said there were “clear signs everywhere” that productivity has hit the skids.

So maybe, March Madness and DST are just great excuses to sit back and kick up our heels even more. 

More than half of office workers don't consistently get a good night's sleep

Home health aides have long had the distinction of being among the lowest-paid workers in the United States, but now it's revealed they also get the least amount of sleep.

Concern over finances and an overall stressful job may be keeping home health aides up at night; but lawyers also made the list of sleep-deprived occupations. 

A new study of professions that get the least and most amount of sleep was commissioned by a mattress company and based on a survey done for the National Center for Health Statistics. The research found health aides, lawyers and police officers got the least  sleep, while loggers, hairstylists and sales representatives were the among the most-rested workers.

“We encourage people to take stock of their sleep habits and make improvements where they can,” said Robert Oexman, director of the Sleep to Live Institute in Joplin, Mo., and a consultant for Sleepy's, the mattress company behind the study.

Here’s a rundown of the sleepiest workers based on average amount of sleep per night:

1. Home Health Aides

2. Lawyers

3. Police Officers

4. Physicians, Paramedics

5. Economists

6. Social Workers

7. Computer Programmers

8. Financial Analysts

9. Plant Operators

10. Secretaries

And here are the workers that get the most shut-eye:

1. Forest, Logging Workers

2. Hairstylists

3. Sales Representatives

4. Bartenders

5. Construction Workers

6. Athletes

7. Landscapers

8. Engineers

9. Aircraft Pilots

10. Teachers

Overall, nobody seems to getting a lot of sleep no matter what they do. Even loggers, who topped the list, only clocked an average of seven hours and 20 minutes sleeping, compared with  six hours and 57 minutes for the sleepiest workers, home health aides.

Related: Home health care industry fights overtime proposal 

What’s so important about getting enough sleep anyway?

Turns out, a lot. Two Harvard Medical School studies found that insomnia does a number on your productivity, and a lack of sleep can affect your health. 

You could make up the difference by napping at work. A 2011 study from the National Sleep Foundation and Philips Electronics found that one in four employees admitted taking a nap at work.

That study also found:

• 85 percent of office workers say they could be more productive if they slept more.
• More than half of office workers don't consistently get a good night's sleep.
• Two-thirds of office workers surveyed said lack of sleep means their day begins on a low note.
• Two-thirds of employees do not wake up before their alarm goes off and more than one-third are not ready to get up when their alarm goes off.

We’re proud to know that many LI readers walked to school uphill in the snow, both ways, and they liked it, same as we did when we were kids.

OK, we can be accused of hyperbole (just ask any teenager we’ve had to deal with in the past 10 years) about how we tough it out as much as anyone, but the post this week on faking sick, by country, generated a bunch of comments that had two dominant themes.

1. I NEVER CALL IN SICK.
2. The French call in least? What? That’s because a) they are Euros who don’t work hard and that’s a bad thing or b) they are Euros who don’t work hard and that’s a good thing.

We will not join the Freedom Fries debate. We will, however, kindly remind those he-men (and women) that if your employer provides sick days and you don’t take them when you have a legitimate reason; you are, essentially, leaving money on the table. We’d also ask that you please quit coughing on us. Repeatedly.

How does it feel to be …
A post on prettier people earning more – $230,000 more over the course of a lifetime – also seemed to strike a chord with you. Including the following quizzical comment (in the interest of volume, we’ve turned off the all caps this time):

"Would you rather have lunch with Catherine Zeta Jones or Whoopi Goldberg?"

Commenter: We’d be fine with either. It’s lunch. What’s your point?

Feeling productive
There weren’t a whole lot of solutions proposed for a post on how companies are doing just fine without having to hire due to employees getting more done. There was a lot of anger from both sides of the political spectrum. Mood of the country, obviously.

Finally
Winner in the ongoing Mercer and SMITH (again with the all caps) magazine “six words about work” contest were announced. The contest rules were pretty much in the title. Come up with a six word sentence describing how you feel about work. After our schedule this week, we offer up a belated entry: “Quitting time can’t come soon enough.”

It’s the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday, and we’re back at work.

If you’re like a lot of people, you probably got a cup of coffee (as an excuse to talk about the game), checked your e-mail (to find out who won the office pool) and went online (to replay some of your favorite Super Bowl commercials).

The day after the Super Bowl may not be a national holiday, but it’s certainly a day of distraction at many offices.

Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. When job rating website Glassdoor polled 500 of its users about Super Bowl Monday, about one in five conceded it’s a less productive day than usual.

But on the plus side, about the same amount of people responding to the online poll said morale is usually higher on the day after the Super Bowl. A few even mentioned employee perks, such as free breakfast.