Death From Above

I spent this morning achieving nothing while WFH, with no motivation and no focus for anything.
I went to the office to see if that would make any difference. It didn't. I had a big task I had to do, and I couldn't do it, and I also couldn't do anything else.

Then I got the big task started with some GenAI help[1], and it became easier - if not easy - to finish it. And having done that seemed to unlock things, and I've been ticking off minor stuff for the rest of the day.

Brains are weird.

[1] Yes, I used some GenAI. Don't hate me. I fed it a failed research proposal of mine and asked it to turn it into an advert for a PhD studentship for the same project, and it did a half-decent job at a first draft to improve upon.
I still have enormous ethical problems with LLMs, and I still feel like their energy use is undoing everything I work for. And they've broken university learning and assessment in a way that we haven't figured out how to handle. But also, I recognise that complaining about that isn't going to stop it, at least until the bubble pops. And my university is all-in on "use it use it use it use it". This is the first time that I've actually found it useful.