What does it mean that boredom is an attention signal?

Boredom is not the absence of stimulation — it is a self-regulatory signal that your attention is misallocated relative to your current skill level, values, or goals.

Example: You sit down to write documentation for a feature you built three months ago. Within ten minutes your hand reaches for your phone, your eyes glaze, and you catch yourself re-reading the same paragraph. You label it laziness. But the signal is precise: the task demands far less cognitive engagement than you are capable of, and your brain is telling you — through boredom — that something about this task-skill pairing needs to change. You either need to increase the challenge (restructure the docs as a tutorial that forces you to explain the architecture to a beginner) or acknowledge that this task genuinely belongs to someone else.

Try this: For the next five days, every time you notice boredom — restlessness, the urge to check your phone, mental wandering during a task — pause and log three things: (1) what you were doing, (2) your skill level for that task on a 1-10 scale, and (3) the challenge level of the task on a 1-10 scale. At the end of five days, plot your entries. Where skill far exceeds challenge, you have an under-stimulation signal. Where challenge slightly exceeds skill, you likely felt engaged. The gap is the data.