Study Hacks Blog

Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education.

“Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write their final assignments. (It turns out that his method of detection—asking ChatGPT itself whether it produced the submissions—was unreliable. He later changed the grades.)

“AI seems almost built for cheating,” explains Ethan Mollick, in his recent bestseller, Co-Intelligence. He predicted, in particular, that paper writing as a pedagogical tool might be on the way out, forcing institutions to adapt to other methods to teach composition: “In-school assignments on non-internet-enabled computers, combined with written exams, will ensure students learn basic writing skills.”

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since we first started hearing these concerns about ChatGPT providing students the perfect cheating machine. As a professor and writer myself, these issues interest me, especially when it comes to academic compositions. So in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, and titled “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?,” I set out to understand how these tools are currently being put to work by students tackling writing assignments.

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In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like daily to-do lists. It went on to reportedly sell more than three million copies, and was even shouted out by Bill Clinton, who cites its influence on his early career in his autobiography.

Revisiting Lakein’s advice today provides a glimpse into office life fifty years ago. And the encounter is shocking.

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Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area.

It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borrowed $3000 from his father-in-law and bought the property. He would come to call it Arrowhead in reference to native artifacts he found in its fields.

Melville’s plan for his time at Arrowhead was to write. He had recently published a series of bestselling adventure novels, drawing from the half-decade he spent wandering the Pacific as a sailor. He felt confident that his literary success would continue and the time was right to fully invest in this vision.

A few days ago, I travelled down to Arrowhead, now preserved by the Berkshire Historical Society, to better understand the writing-centered life that Melville constructed.

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I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons.

Here’s a view from the desk:

This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed. (Indeed, as the owner told me, I’m not the first professional writer to use this space for this purpose in recent years.)

In my daily life in Takoma Park, Maryland, I don’t lack for interesting places to write. We designed the library in our house, which includes a custom-built Huston & Company library-style desk, specifically with writing in mind. (If you’re interested in what this looks like, the Spanish newspaper El País recently published a profile that includes a nice shot of me at my desk.) When I need a change of scenery while at home, I’ll also write on my front porch, where, during the grossest days of the DC summer, I’ll use a large floor fan to blow away the mosquitos and moderate the temperature. I also spend a considerable amount of time working amid the comforting din of our local coffee shop.

But as long-time readers of this newsletter know, I’ve always felt that there was something particularly special about the idea of writing in a quiet shed nestled in a quiet piece of natural property, such as what was enjoyed by Michael Pollan, David McCullough, and, perhaps my favorite example, E.B. White:

Which is all to say that I was excited, on arriving at this rental property, to spend a few weeks wrangling the early stages of a new book in a writing shed of my own.

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? It seemed to be prominently displayed in every bookstore I visited, and, as you might imagine, I visited a lot of bookstores.

Unable to ignore it, I eventually took a closer look and learned more about the central villain of van Tulleken’s treatise: ultra-processed food, a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system, and inspired by Michael Pollan’s concept of “edible food-like substances.”

Ultra-processed foods, at their most damaging extreme, are made by breaking down core stock ingredients such as corn or soy into their basic organic building blocks, then recombining these elements into hyper-palatable combinations, rich in salt, sugar, and fat, soaked with unpronounceable chemical emulsifiers and preservatives.

As Chris van Tulleken points out, the problem with ultra-processed foods is that they’re engineered to hijack our desire mechanisms, making them literally irresistible. The result is that we consume way more calories than we need in arguably the least healthy form possible. Give me a bag of Doritos (a classic ultra-processed food) and I’ll have a hard time stopping until it’s empty. I’m much less likely to similarly gorge myself on, say, a salad or baked chicken.

I was thinking about this book recently as Scott Young and I were prepared to re-open our course, Life of Focus, for new registrations next week. One of the three month-long modules of this course focuses on implementing ideas from my book Digital Minimalism to help you regain control of your attention from the insistent attraction of screens.

It occurred to me that in this concept of ultra-processed food we can find a useful analogy for understanding both our struggles to disconnect, and for how we might succeed in this aspiration going forward.

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Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that the club’s approximately 1,000 employees had enjoyed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t like it,” he said in a recent all staff meeting, “please seek alternative employment.”

Ratcliffe is not necessarily wrong to view remote work with skepticism. Having covered this topic extensively for The New Yorker, I don’t align myself with the crowd that automatically associates telecommuting with a self-evident pro-labor progressivism. Though I agree that flexible work arrangements will play an important role in the future of the knowledge sector, I also think that they’re hard to get right, and that we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how to implement them well — so for the moment, wariness is justified.

My problem with Ratcliffe’s return to office plan is instead the evidence he used to justify it. As reported by The Guardian, Ratcliffe supported his new policy by noting that when he experimented with a work-from-home Fridays program with another one of his companies, they measured a 20% drop in email traffic.

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In recent months, I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews about my new book, Slow Productivity. I’m often asked during these conversations about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the world of knowledge work.

I don’t talk much about AI in my book, as it focuses more on advice that individuals can put into place right now to escape busyness and find a more sustainable path toward meaningful accomplishment. But it’s a topic I do think a lot about in my role as a computer scientist and digital theorist, as well as in my recent journalism for The New Yorker (see, for example, this and this).

With this in mind, I thought I would share three current thoughts about the intersections of AI and office productivity…

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I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be talking about my books in person again after having to launch my last title during a pandemic.

It was also a great opportunity to thank people for their support of Slow Productivity, which just yesterday landed #4 on the NYT’s monthly business bestseller list. (If you haven’t bought Slow Productivity yet, you should! If you read this newsletter, you’ll love it…)

It’s with all this in mind that I wanted to briefly share two upcoming opportunities to come meet me and hear me talk about Slow Productivity in the DC area next week!

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