Goblin.Tools and the Double-Edged Sword of Productivity AI
Here are my initial thoughts…
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A few quick notes before we dive in today
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Live Slow Productivity Interview this Thursday
Join me at 10:45am Eastern Time on July 20th at “The Women Unleashed” summit to learn about Slow Productivity. During this empowering event, I’ll be discussing Slow Productivity with the summit’s facilitator, Business Coach Rajaa Faour. You’ll discover how to protect your energy levels, prioritize self-care, and achieve a healthier balance between productivity and well-being. There will be a number of other researchers and experts speaking on related topics that day. The summit is free with an option to upgrade for extra resources and recordings. Hope to see you there!
When I teach goal setting, I break it down into two key components: making your goal actionable, and making your goal achievable.
An actionable goal is one that you can take action on, which means you know which tasks you need to accomplish and the order in which you need to do them.
To make a goal more achievable, we can develop proactive plans we can set now and acute actions we can take in the future to mitigate potential obstacles. We can also get to know our personal resources (time, energy, focus, physical comfort, mental health, spoons, etc.) so we can measure them and allocate them as necessary.
Today I want to explore an AI tool called Goblin.Tools that can automatically make goals more actionable. I’ve kept a distance from using AI for work, mainly due to a skepticism of sharing personal data with the void of the internet. I’m not a technology scholar and I don’t understand how OpenAI (the model used by Goblin.Tools) works, but I did find some of the instructions a little eerie when I asked it to help me write a dissertation about the topic I actually did write a dissertation about.
Still, I appreciate the program Goblin.Tools because it breaks down complicated or challenging goals into steps. I learned about the tool from Erin of MoodyNoonStudio’s video about it. I’ll share some instructions, a model of me using it, and then some ways I think it could be helpful.
Here’s the gist:
You identify a project or task that is feeling aversive and challenging.
You enter the tool into the program and select a level of difficulty you’re having, from 1/low to 5/very difficult.
You then add the item to your list. To break it down, click the little “magic wand” symbol to the right of the item and voila, your task is broken down into smaller steps.
If any of those steps still feel daunting or challenging to you, you can use the magic wand to break them down even further.
Putting it to Use
As the author of the video shows, this tool is excellent for breaking down household and personal care tasks. I would definitely recommend this to my clients who may want a little extra support making tasks actionable. But I wanted to see how it fared with academic tasks, so I asked it to help me write a dissertation and selected the “very difficult” option so it would offer increased support.
I asked it to help me write a dissertation because I’ve already written a dissertation and I have a good idea of what steps I would take if I ever had to write another one. The initial list of steps it came up with was pretty appropriate for a starting point.
Just for fun, I decided to ask the tool to break down something that was closer to my actual dissertation topic: write a dissertation about Lisa Ben’s rhetoric.
And then, just to explore the capacity of the tool, I asked it to write a dissertation about Lisa Ben’s use of queer rhetoric to undermine homophobic discourse in the 1940s, the actual topic of my PhD research.
When I expanded some of the tasks to get more specific, they remained quite broad, suggesting things like
When I copied and pasted the instruction to “identify instances in which Lisa Ben used queer rhetoric to subvert anti-gay rhetoric in her publications” into Google, my own dissertation came up as the first result. I couldn’t find that precise wording in my document, but it’s a good paraphrase of my content. This made me feel uneasy and wonder how tools like this could be helpful for starting projects but may accidentally lead to plagiarizing other folks’ research and writing.
When Would Goblin.Tools be Helpful?
This tool may come in handy if you have a task to work on and you’re feeling stalled or stuck. Because it breaks down the tasks into smaller chunks and guides you through step-by-step, you may find more success in doing a smaller task that takes a shorter amount of time.
Another thing I like about this tool is that it provides you with a map or a recipe for completing a project, which means you can skim the list of instructions and check if you need to procure anything before you get started.
What is Lacking?
Something Goblin.Tools misses, however, is that some tasks are much more challenging for folks than others. When I work with clients one-on-one, we generate task lists and develop approaches that are informed by each person’s individual strengths, challenges, and actual experiences with time, energy, focus, and physical and mental capacity. I asked Goblin.Tools to break down writing a dissertation and it gave me a vague roadmap, but what it didn’t say was to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, limiting your work sessions so you don’t burn out, build a support system, etc. If you use Goblin.Tools, remember that each checkbox and task may require vastly different amounts of time or energy.
In keeping our humanity at the center of our productivity practices, I would also encourage folks to be mindful when using this or other AI tools for academic or writing projects. While Goblin.Tools can give us a general roadmap, zooming in too closely on the signposts it provides may lead us to accidentally mimicking the work of others. After all, AI sources its ideas from the Internet, which up until this point, has consisted of content made by other human beings.
What about you?
Are you more AI adventurous than me? Have you used this tool or something similar to help you break down your personal or professional tasks?
Curiosities
This section of my letters is for things that made me say “hmmm” or “wow!” recently.
This house loves a documentary. We recently watched Burden of Proof on HBO and Vatican Girl on Netflix. Both focused on missing women and the decades-long searches their families made and continue to make to find them. Vatican Girl was particularly interesting to me, as I knew next to nothing about the Vatican before I watched it, and it’s an intense microcosm of power.
I am not a big live music person because I don’t like standing for long periods of time. I was happy to score some seated tickets to see Boygenious in September. The last concert I attended was my favorite band, Bon Iver, years and years ago. It’s fun to have something like this to look forward to, even if it is months away.
For Your Consideration
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Take good care,
Dr. Kate