As I try to move a little further away from social media, I find my mind wandering a bit while I’m work. Traditionally I’d grab my phone and look at Mastodon or something, but I find social media being a bit cantankerous these days. Watching a YouTube video might be a good diversion, but then YouTube starts recommending “Bewitched” episodes and then people throwing chairs at a wedding or something and I end up going down a rabbit hole with those shenanigans, so I try to stay away from the videos as well.
What to do, what to do.
I’ve been doing quite a bit with ChatGPT lately, mainly in the space of feeding it some code I’ve written and asking it to “make it better”. The results are surprisingly a strong learning tool for me, because some of the time it breaks the code completely and I have to figure out how to fix it, but most of the time it shows me a coding technique I had not tried before. That’s rather nifty.
When I get an impulse to start playing around with social media, I now try asking ChatGPT some questions. For example, instead of jumping on Mastodon after lunch, I did this:
I’m finding having a brief conversation with ChatGPT around a productive topic is helping me stay on point today. And so far I have an impressive Accomplishments list going for a Monday afternoon.
Yay AI!
