One of the most frustrating parts of college productivity is not necessarily completing assignments – it’s starting them. 

Does this sound familiar? You sit down with every intention of being productive, open your laptop, glance at the assignment, and suddenly feel mentally stuck. Minutes pass. Maybe you reorganize your desktop, check your email, scroll social media, or reread the assignment instructions three times without beginning. 

This experience is often referred to as “task paralysis,” and it is far more common than many students realize. Contrary to popular belief, task paralysis is usually not caused by laziness or a lack of motivation. More often, the brain struggles because the assignment feels too large, too vague, or too cognitively demanding to immediately process. 

When a task feels overwhelming, the brain tends to avoid it altogether. A paper becomes “impossible.” A project becomes “too much.” Even relatively simple assignments can create disproportionate stress when the starting point feels unclear. This is where artificial intelligence is surprisingly useful for students; not as a shortcut for avoiding work, but as a tool for reducing friction and creating momentum. Instead of approaching a task as one massive responsibility, AI can help break assignments into extremely small, manageable actions. The goal is not immediate productivity perfection. The goal is simply to begin. 

A helpful prompt might look like this: 

“I am struggling to start [Task]. Break this into very small steps that each take less than one minute. Tell me exactly what I should do first.” 

That specificity matters! 

When you ask AI to generate “ridiculously small” actions, the assignment becomes psychologically easier to approach. Rather than confronting an intimidating objective like “Write my sociology paper,” the student receives a sequence of low-pressure actions such as: 

• Open your laptop.
• Create a new document.
• Title the document with the course name.
• Paste the assignment instructions at the top.
• Write one informal sentence answering the question.
• Copy three quotations from the reading into the document.
• Highlight the quotation you want to analyze first.

At first glance, these steps may seem almost too simple to matter. However, their effectiveness comes from reducing cognitive resistance. The brain often perceives large assignments as uncertain, mentally expensive, and emotionally uncomfortable. Tiny steps reduce that uncertainty. Instead of demanding hours of concentration upfront, the brain only must complete one manageable action at a time. Psychologically, this creates momentum. 

Once the document is open, writing one sentence feels easier. Once one sentence exists, finding a supporting quote feels more approachable. Gradually, the assignment stops feeling like an abstract burden and starts becoming a concrete progress. This process also helps students separate initiation from perfection. Many students subconsciously believe they need to feel motivated, inspired, or fully prepared before beginning an assignment. In reality, motivation often appears after action has already started. AI can help bridge that gap by making the first step feel small enough to begin without emotional resistance. 

Ultimately, overcoming task paralysis is rarely about forcing yourself to “work harder.” More often, it is about lowering the barrier to entry. Progress begins when the task feels approachable enough to start. And sometimes, opening the document and writing one imperfect sentence is all it takes to regain momentum. 

It is ever so tempting to lean into the convenience of using AI as a study tool. Not only does it not judge you for not knowing a concept that you definitely should have mastered four weeks ago, it’s also available at midnight on a Sunday when you’re actually studying (and not just at 10 AM on Tuesdays, when your professor holds their only weekly office hours). However, like most things that come cheap and easy, it’s not a proper replacement for the real thing. 

Learning, when done right, is often time-consuming, requires trial and error, and can be uncomfortable. In other words, the ease of using AI for studying could rob you of the necessary ingredients for deeper learning. 

Research (Deslauriers, et al., 2019) has shown that active learning strategies (think: doing practice problems with your classmates with supervision from your professor), though often more frustrating and time-consuming, tend to be more effective than other learning methods that “feel better” on the surface. In this study, participants who attended a highly engaging talk and reported that they felt they had learned a great deal actually performed worse on a follow-up test compared to participants who had gone through what they perceived as a more frustrating and less effective study method: active learning. 

What does this tell us? No, it’s not that studying is only good when it feels miserable. The real lessons here are that 1) we are not good judges of our own learning and 2) that learning is most effective when it’s active. 

Using AI is one of those study strategies that feel good in the moment, but can often be too passive to be truly effective. Sure, it compliments us. It also gives us explanations in words that even a 5-year-old can understand. But defaulting to using AI can result in a false sense of mastery. When you look to AI to give you the answers without attempting to find them on your own, you lose the opportunity to experience the laborious but ultimately fruitful process of deep cognitive engagement that results in enduring learning. 

What feels fluid, what feels facile, is not always what is best for your learning. Sometimes convenience isn’t everything. 

Sources: 

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L.S., Miller, K., Callaghan, & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. PNAS, 116(39), 19251- 19257.  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

Mills, A. (2025). AI and College Writing: An Orientation for Students. Creative Commons. Retrieved May, 26, 2026, from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cfs_ubpIEOUpSfSBTxQLU54jyOtMYpDYyRQLcLw4Kn4/edit?tab=t.0. 

What is Gemini Notebook?

Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) is an AI tool powered by Google’s Gemini AI. Google calls it, “a research and thinking partner, grounded in information you trust.”  Essentially, it can serve as an AI study buddy to complement more traditional study methods in helping you understand, synthesize, and retain information.

How does it work?

You upload sources such as PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, and text files into themed “notebooks” based on your classes or projects. From there, you can review the original sources in the sources panel on the left of your screen, ask questions about them in the central chat panel, or generate AI visuals, quizzes, study guides, and other tools in the studio panel on the right side of your screen. It’s important to note that you can always select and unselect the sources you want to use for your chat or studio project. You can pull from all of them, some of them, or just one of them. What makes Gemini Notebook special is that it is entirely grounded in the information you provide, not the entire internet. So, the chances of it hallucinating (making stuff up) are reduced.

What are some key features?

Mind Map

This feature helps you see connections and get a big-picture overview by creating a branching diagram of key concepts in related sources. If you want to learn more about a particular concept, click on that Mind Map node, and Gemini Notebook will create a prompt in the chat panel to the effect of “Discuss what these sources say about Concept X in the Context of Y.”

Create Report

This feature summarizes information into different written report formats. The default options include a briefing document that highlights key themes; a study guide with a short-answer quiz, essay prompts, and a glossary of terms; and an easy-to-read blog post. You can also ask it to create FAQs, timelines, or other relevant formats that it will suggest based on your uploaded sources.

Audio Overview

This feature creates a podcast-style discussion between two AI hosts of the most compelling information from your selected sources. There are several different default styles to choose from, or you can also create a prompt that tells the AI exactly what you would like the audio overview to focus on.

How can it be used to complement traditional study methods?

Here are some ideas on how to use Gemini Notebook to complement traditional study methods:

Previewing a text

Before starting a long and dense text, you could create a slide deck or video overview highlighting the main ideas of your text. These tools can prompt you to think of questions that you hope the full text will answer. Jot down your questions, then read the text to find the answers.

Testing your understanding

Use the chat panel to explain in your own words what you have understood from a text and ask Gemini Notebook for feedback on how accurate your understanding is and what key points you may have missed. Whenever you get a good chat response, you can save that response as a note.

Dual coding

Transform your texts and notes into visuals such as a slide deck, infographic, mind map, or organized data table, so you have more than one way to remember key information.

Self-quizzing

Use the flashcard, multiple-choice quizzes, or study guide features to interact with your course materials through active recall. For more sophisticated self-testing, ask the chat to create questions that you should be able to answer after reading, and then practice answering them.

Learning on the go

Create podcast-style audio overviews in advance that you can play back on the Gemini AI app to listen to while you’re traveling or exercising. These overviews can be used to either preview new material or review material you have already read.

Distributed practice

There’s a lot you can do with Gemini Notebook, and you probably wouldn’t want to do everything all at once, which lends itself well to distributed practice, or spacing your studying out over time. So, on Day 1 you can upload your source material and do a preview to orient yourself. On Day 2, you can do a thorough read on your own. On Day 3, you can create a video or audio overview to review what you read the day before. On Day 4, you can create flashcards and quizzes, and so on. Have fun!

Let’s be realistic. People use AI to write. But not many of us have paused to ask ourselves whether using AI to write is actually harmful. Outside of academic integrity concerns (which are very real, by the way), why wouldn’t you use AI to help you write? Besides, it saves time, gives us good ideas, and even fixes our grammatical errors! So, what’s the downside, you might ask?

Let’s discuss. 

A group of researchers at MIT recently used electroencephalography (EEG) analysis to see what happens in our brains when we use Chat GPT to help us write (Kosmyna, et al., 2025). The study found that participants who used Chat GPT from the very beginning of their writing process had lower levels of neural connectivity, less sense of ownership of their writing, and very flimsy memory of what they had written. On the other hand, participants who wrote only using their brains and no other tools had greater neural connectivity during their writing process. Seems pretty obvious, right? 

There’s more! 

What’s surprising is that this study also found that when the brain-only group engaged AI in the final stages of their writing, they had more diverse neural activation than any other group in the study. On the other hand, for the participants who used AI from the very beginning, even when they were asked to switch back to a brain-only writing method, they still could not achieve as deep a cognitive engagement as the other participant groups. So when you engage AI in your writing process seems to matter.

When you use AI from the very beginning of the writing process, you fundamentally change the way your brain orients itself to the writing task and how it engages with the topic. You outsource too much of the cognitive heavy lifting required to meaningfully engage with the material.

Our advice? Avoid leaning on AI to help you write papers for your classes, but if you do choose to use AI, try to wait as long as possible in your writing process before engaging it. 

Sources:

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. ArXiv.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872