10 BEST Things to Do When You Are Bored

In early 2020, when COVID-19 emerged from its slumber and the world was starting to go into a full lockdown, I thought to myself, "This won't last, and it will surely pass in no time." A year and a half later, I found myself under another lockdown due to the new variant.

As I was sitting at home, yearning for travel, I found myself more and more occupied by the things that I have always wanted to do but never had the time to do.

The more I settled myself into the boring life of no travel, the more I realized that there are still so many things I can do, so many new skills I can learn, and so much clutter in my life to clean up.

After 2 years of lockdown from 2020 - 2022, I have decided to compile a list of things that have kept me going during that period and hopefully this will help inspire you during your travel downtime.

Without further ado, here are the 10 best things to do when you are bored that will help you become more productive, reignite your passion and excitement, and help you look forward to traveling again.

Ever wonder what being a travel blogger is like during COVID-19? Read this:Being A Travel Blogger During COVID-19 - What Is It Like?

Table of Contents

1. Learn New Skill on Skillshare
2. Read Travel Books
3. Upgrade Your Camera Gear
4. Improve Your Home Workspace
5. Declutter Your Physical Life
6. Declutter Your Digital Life
7. Reorganize Your Photos and Videos
8. Do Budget Planning and Reduce Unnecessary Costs
9. Catch up on new movies and documentaries
10. Prepare for your Next Trip
Further Reading for Inspiration

1. Learn New Skill on Skillshare

One of the best things I like about the Internet is its wealth of free knowledge right at your fingertips. Did you know that I do not have any degree related to anything I do to earn money today?

I was not professionally taught how to write, nor do I have someone to teach me about photography, filmmaking, web design, and all the things I do to keep this travel blog going.

Most of the things I do now were self-taught through years and years of being obsessed with these topics, but I never had access to professional training through proper channels. I just go on the internet and start learning one tutorial article at a time.

Learning through the internet back then was not an easy task, though. It took years for me to be able to have the confidence to do it professionally. Back then, there was no YouTube or a learning platform like Skillshare that I could easily go on and learn new skills directly from professionals.

Nowadays, if you have the passion for it, you can learn almost any skill directly from professionals on a platform like Skillshare. Here, you will have access to thousands of online classes for creative and curious people on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more.

If you find yourself wanting to improve a certain skill set, such as travel photography, I recommend you go to Skillshare, browse through the courses they have available, and start learning directly from professional travel photographers like Dan Rubin through a series of well-crafted tutorial videos that will help turn your boredom into a productive learning endeavor.

If you find yourself with nothing else to do, just go on Skillshare and browse your way through all the available courses there and see what new skills you can pick up during travel downtime. Who knows, maybe when this is over in a few years, you might find yourself making a ton of money from the skills you learn on Skillshare when you are bored. Wouldn't that be something? 😉

2. Read Travel Books

If you had told me 2 years ago that traveling would be impossible, I would probably have dismissed it as a joke. But now that we are living in this cruel, cruel world, we travelers will have to find a way to curb the wanderlust feeling of travel for the time being.

I found that the best way to do that is to lose myself in one of the many great travel books out there that will transport you to a new place without your having to leave your home and risk getting infected by COVID-19.

One of the best books I read recently is called The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller. It is not a travel book per se, as the book follows how the ancient scientific knowledge of antiquity, the Elements, Method of Medicine, and the Almagest by Euclid, Galen, and Ptolemy, travels through seven ancient cities from Southern Europe to the Arab World and back, preserving them for over a thousand years.

It's the journey of these pieces of scientific knowledge through places like Baghdad, Toledo, and Sicily that makes me want to follow their footsteps and travel to all these places when the world finally opens up again.

Once I finish the book, I will have more than 20 new pins of places I want to visit all over Italy and Spain on Google. Now I will know where I want to be when I finally make it to Italy after this COVID thing is over.

If you are looking for a little escape from the cruel reality of COVID-19 that we are all living in, I suggest you go on Amazon and find yourself some nice travel books to get lost in and help you look forward to the world when traveling is possible again.

Look for travel books to read? Check out:8 Great Travel Books to Read

3. Upgrade Your Camera Gear

I don't change camera gear very often. When I am on the road, I do not have the luxury of buying new gear due to many constraints from living life all over the place. However, whenever I get back home for some time, I always look for ways to improve my travel photography game.

Now that we are stuck at home, for the time being, it is a great time to look for ways to 10 Best Travel Cameras to Buy to help improve your photography game for when the world opens up.

Buying new lenses is one of the best investments you can make when it comes to upgrading camera gear. Lens prices do not depreciate as much over time as camera bodies do. They are also great for expanding the possibilities of what you can do with your cameras.

For example, I used to carry one lens, the Sony 16-70 F4 Zeiss lens (24-105 full-frame equivalent), which worked well for many years. However, the moment I got myself an upgrade to the Sony 16-55mm F2.8 lens (24-70mm equivalent), together with another super-telephoto lens, the Sony 70-350mm G lens, all of a sudden, my photos are no longer blurry and noisy at night.

Now, I can take wildlife photos as well as stunning landscape photography that I wouldn't have been able to do with just one lens. Buying new lenses will allow you to reignite your excitement for photography to the same level as when you were starting out.

And so, if you are feeling a little unenthusiastic about photography lately, especially when we are all stuck at home right now, I highly recommend you browse through Amazon for some new lenses for your camera. It can help improve your photography and get you excited for future travel again.

Look for new travel lenses? Check out:The Best Travel Lenses For Sony A7III, A7C, A7RIV, And More

4. Improve Your Home Workspace

One of the first things I learned after working from home for the past 6 years is how important your home workspace is for your creativity. Now that we are all stuck working from home, it is time to upgrade and improve your workspace a bit more.

After all, you are spending more than 7 hours at your home working, and if you are going to spend that much time working at home for the foreseeable future, you might as well make it as comfortable as possible.

One of the first things you should invest in when it comes to improving a home workspace is a good ergonomic chair. Find a good, durable chair that will last you many years and one that will help alleviate the pressure from your lumbar spine and help distribute weight equally throughout while you sit.

A Herman Miller Aeron Chair is one of the best office chairs you can get. It is expensive, but it lasts forever. You can even find a second-hand one for more than half the retail price. They are highly adjustable for any type of body, and they are one of the most comfortable chairs you can sit on.

You should also invest in a table that will allow you to adjust the height for comfort, like this electric height adjustable workstation table that you can use as a regular table as well as a stand-up table.

You can also buy a new ultra-wide computer screen for better multitasking like the Samsung Ultrawide Monitor, a new ergonomic keyboard like the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, or a wireless ergonomic mouse, the MX Master 3 by Logitech to prevent you from getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve your workspace at home to make it more comfortable and make you more productive. Changing up your workspace may also help your mental health, especially for those of you who are feeling down due to the travel downtime. To me, that's worth a shot in and of itself.

New to remote working? Read this:8 Best Tips For Working From Home Remotely

5. Declutter Your Physical Life

Talking about buying new things, I also highly recommend that you look into eliminating some of the stuff in your life that you no longer need when you are bored and stuck at home.

Do you have old camera gear that you no longer use lying around at home? Why not sell it and earn a little bit of money while decluttering your physical life and freeing up some space in your home.

How about those clothes that you no longer wear? Why not give them away in places like the American Red Cross or Goodwill? Donating things to those who are in need doesn't just help the people in need, but it will also improve your mental health as you will feel like you have a positive impact on the world, which is not easy to come by and is very much welcomed during travel downtimes.

All in all, if you are feeling bored at home, it is time to declutter your life. You will find that you are much happier when you have fewer things than when you have all those things cluttering up your life unnecessarily.

6. Declutter Your Digital Life

Decluttering your digital life is also as important as decluttering your physical life. With so many noises out there in the online world, such as spam emails and unwanted notifications, it is about time you take control of your digital life back from your phone. Spend this downtime unsubscribing from unwanted email newsletters you no longer need and unfollowing people who do not inspire you.

I once went offline for about 4 days, and when I got back from a trip off the grid, I was bombarded with more than 100 emails, most of which were from online services I no longer use. After that incident, I decided to take back control of my digital life and unsubscribe from all the services and newsletters I no longer use, one by one.

I also set up a filter on my Gmail to filter out unwanted emails, turned off notifications on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and unfollowed people who do not inspire me in a positive way. That way, I can see what is going on in the online world when I want to, not when the apps want me to.

If you are feeling a little bored today, why not go on your social network accounts and start unfollowing people who do nothing but annoy you or put you down with their oversharing behavior, and instead follow those who give you positive vibes?

By the end of this, you will feel like you are in more control of your digital life and feel like the technology you have is working for you, not the other way around.

7. Reorganize Your Photos and Videos

With so much photo and video content that we produce with our smartphones and cameras and share them on social media on a daily basis, your digital media archive can get overwhelming real fast if you do not take control of it.

With everyone being stuck at home at the moment, now is the best time for you to start looking into organizing all these photos and videos you captured over the years and backing them all up in case your phone gets stolen or your computer breaks, so you can easily access them when you want to.

Google Photos is a great way to back up your photos online, so you can access them from anywhere without them eating up your phone's storage. You can also easily access your photos with a search engine, which makes it much easier to find the photos you want, when you want them.

For those of us who shoot RAW and carry big cameras, this is also a great time for us to look into a backup solution for all our valuable RAW photos. You can get a fast external hard drive to allow you to back up photos, or you can go even further and get a NAS to store and create your very own Google Photos.

There are many ways you can back up your photos and videos, and even though it may not seem as exciting as, say, going traveling and taking photos, having an efficient backup process is just as important, if not more so. The earlier you take control of it, the better and less overwhelming it will become.

Looking for the best storage solution for your growing catalog of photos and videos? Check out:How I Store My Photos And Videos

8. Do Budget Planning and Reduce Unnecessary Costs

One of the first things I did the moment I realized that my income from my travel blog would be obliterated by COVID-19 was budget planning. I created a Google Sheet file and recorded all the income and expenses for my life. Then, I started slimming down the expenses to keep up with the decrease in income affected by the pandemic.

With budget planning, I was able to see how much money I was spending on online services such as hosting, storage, CDN, Spotify, Google Drive, etc., and I was able to come up with a return on investment (ROI) for these services. This helped me eliminate or downgrade the ones that had barely any impact on my income.

I was able to reduce more than $100 of expenses wasted on services that I do not really need or that have cheaper alternatives, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without having a solid budget planning process.

If you find yourself getting bored at home, why not try doing budget planning for your life? List all the income and expenses you have and see where you can optimize it and save some money. You will be surprised by just how much money you have wasted on things you do not need online. You can get a sample of my budget plan template below:

Download Budget Plan Template

9. Catch up on new movies and documentaries

Now, if you are thinking that all these things I listed above seem like more work than less play, then maybe it is time for you to wind down a little, relax, and enjoy a few movies and documentaries on Netflix.

Are there any movies that you have wanted to watch but never really had the time? Want to watch the full extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Want to binge-watch Stranger Things? Want to learn a bit more about the cult that took over Antelope, Oregon in the Wild Wild Country documentary? Now is a great time to do it.

There is no shame in doing nothing but watching movies, especially during this unprecedented time. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a little downtime with a nice movie or documentary. In the process, expand your worldview a little bit more.

Looking for free short documentaries to expand your worldview? Check out:7 BEST Short Documentaries About The World To Watch

10. Prepare for your Next Trip

Last but not least, now that the traveling is back in full swing, what better way to help you look forward than to start planning your next trip. Now that we have improved our skills, upgraded our camera gear, and read up on travel, it is time to prepare for where you want to go next.

I was planning to visit Iceland for the longest time, and now that nature is healing after the 2 years lockdown, there is no better time to visit Iceland than now, and they really could use some tourist money to bring the economy back to what it was before 2020.

If you are feeling a little bored and uninspired at home, look on Google Maps, search through Google Images and Pinterest for inspiring travel photos, pick a country you want to visit, and start planning and preparing for the ultimate trip of your life when all of this is over.