Liam: Every Monday morning, right, this design leader, he sits down. Thirty minutes, every week, he's just manually writing this update for his all-hands meeting. Project lists, code reviews, numbers. The whole lot.
Harper: And you'd think, okay, thirty minutes every single week, that's a prime candidate for automation, right? Like, his colleagues are constantly asking him, 'Why aren't you just automating this?'
Liam: Aye, you'd think. Save himself a proper chunk of time.
Harper: Exactly! But he doesn't. And at first, I thought, well, maybe he's just, you know, a bit old-school, or doesn't trust the tech. But his reason, the one he struggles to articulate to his colleagues, is actually really interesting.
Liam: Go on then, what is it?
Harper: He says the document isn't the point. Those thirty minutes? That's the only time all week he's forced to sit with absolutely everything. He sees where each project is, what's stuck, what he's been avoiding. It forces a kind of holistic review, an accounting, that he just wouldn't do otherwise.
Liam: So it's not about the output, the report itself, but what he's actually doing in his head while he's making it.
Harper: Exactly. He calls them 'cognitive habits.' It's about tasks where the real value isn't the thing you produce, but what happens to your brain while you're doing it. The article calls it 'desirable difficulty.'
Liam: Desirable difficulty? So like, making it harder on purpose, just for the sake of it?
Harper: Not just for the sake of it, no. It's the idea that cognitive effort isn't always friction to be eliminated. Sometimes, it's the actual mechanism by which we learn and retain things. The brain needs that workout. Think about it, modern life made physical effort optional, right? That's why we invented gyms.
Liam: Aye, true that. Nobody's chasing down their dinner with a spear anymore.
Harper: Right. So, the article's suggesting that AI is making certain kinds of thinking optional. And maybe, just like we have physical gyms, we're gonna need a 'thinking gym' – deliberate spaces, tasks we protect, not because they're efficient, but because skipping them has a cost we don't notice until later.
Liam: So, like, if you're writing a shopping list out by hand, instead of just using your phone, that's you doing a brain workout?
Harper: It could be! It's about asking, what's the actual goal here? If your goal is pure productivity, then yeah, automate the shopping list, hit the button. But if the goal is to understand something, to reflect, to grow, then you need to protect the process.
Liam: Hmm.
Harper: It's like, you know how when you had to navigate a new city with a paper map, before Google Maps? You'd unfold the thing, trace your route, look for landmarks. You built a mental model of the city, right? You understood its layout.
Liam: Aye, you proper learned it. Got a sense of direction.
Harper: But with turn-by-turn directions on your phone? You get to your destination, sure. But you have zero spatial awareness of how you got there. You could do the same route a dozen times and still not know the street names. You arrived, but you didn't really understand.
Liam: Right. Okay, let's step back.
Harper: Yeah?
Liam: This all sounds a bit... romantic, doesn't it? This 'desirable difficulty.' For most people, most of the time, automating tedious work is a proper huge win. That freed-up thirty minutes? You can use that for actual deep thinking, creative work, not just routine accounting of what's already happened.
Harper: But what if the 'routine accounting' was what sparked the deep thinking? What if by automating it, you never even get to that point? You're just freeing up time that then gets filled with more output-focused tasks.
Liam: But you could actively choose to use that time for something else. Something truly creative. This just feels like... a luxury belief. For people who have the time to sit and manually write reports when they could just press a button.
Harper: It's less about luxury and more about recognition. Like, recognizing that sometimes the 'tedious' part is actually where the insight happens. If you always offload the 'tedious' parts, sometimes the hard thinking quietly disappears too, because you never quite needed to do it.
Liam: But for the vast majority of stuff, I reckon getting rid of the grunt work is a good thing. I'd take the extra thirty minutes in my week any day.
Harper: And I'm not saying automation is bad across the board. It's just about being intentional. Is the goal the raft, or is it getting across the river?
Liam: Right, but how do we even know which difficulties are 'desirable' for learning and which are just pointless friction we should absolutely get rid of? Where's the line, eh? I'm Liam.
Harper: And I'm Harper. This has been Manish Chiniwalar's Station.