Put Your A.I. Agents to Work With These 5 Killer Tasks; The New York Times, October 25, 2026

Brian X. Chen, The New York Times; Put Your A.I. Agents to Work With These 5 Killer Tasks

When you start using Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s dots for these tasks — like applying for jobs and booking hard-to-get restaurant tables — you may never go back.

"Since its debut last month, Meta’s Muse, the artificially intelligent assistant that performs tasks on a user’s behalf, has been the most downloaded phone app. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has responded with a competitor called dots, a similar assistant that costs $100 a month to use.

Welcome to the era of agents, digital assistants that use our devices for us. Though they share many similarities with chatbots, agents like Muse and dots serve a different purpose. Chatbots primarily provide answers to questions. Agents are essentially bots with their own computer and web browser, so they can do more complicated things like applying for jobs, booking restaurant tables and sending emails."

Burned Out? Start Here.; The New York Times, January 7, 2025

Ezra Klein , The New York Times; Burned Out? Start Here.

"I like to begin the show each year with an episode about something I’m thinking through personally. Call it resolutions-adjacent podcasting. And what was present for me as we neared the end of last year was a pretty real case of burnout. I took some of December off, and I’m feeling more grounded now. But that was my frame of mind when I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.”

The book connected for me. Burkeman’s big idea, which he described in “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” his 2021 best seller, is that no productivity system will ever deliver what it is promising: a sense of control, a feeling that you’ve mastered your task list in some enduring way, that you’ve built levees strong enough to withstand life’s chaos.

So Burkeman’s question is really the reverse: What if rather than starting from the presumption that it can all be brought under control, you began with the presumption that it can’t be? What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How then would you live?

Do I think Burkeman — or anyone, really — has the answer to that question? No. But I do think he asks good questions, and he curates good insights. And questions are often more useful than answers."

Why time management is ruining our lives; Guardian, 12/22/16

Oliver Burkeman, Guardian; Why time management is ruining our lives:

"Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days. “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritise, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?"