If you’ve ever ended the day exhausted but somehow feeling like you got nothing done, you’re not imagining it. There are real reasons why you can’t get anything done — and your phone is only part of the story. This episode breaks down three types of attention theft that are quietly draining your focus, from doom scrolling to AI-generated to-do lists that never get touched.
Table of Contents
Reducing Screen Time Is Hard
I’ve been making a conscious effort to reduce my screen time this year, and let me tell you, it has not been easy. It is hard to quit your damn phone. At one point, toward the beginning of the year, I was spending up to eight hours a day on my phone. Now I’m averaging around three hours a day, which is still a lot.
I definitely still want to get it down. But considering I own a marketing agency and my job is essentially to be chronically online, three hours is pretty good. And I’ve noticed such a difference in my life — I am more patient, less irritable, and most importantly, I have so much time. It really made me realize how much attention I was giving away without even thinking about it.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that our phones are only part of the problem. This is not just going to be me yapping about why you need to quit your damn phone. I want to open it up to a broader conversation about three different types of consumption that are currently stealing our attention.
Three Types of Attention Theft
The first is mindless consumption: doom scrolling, checking notifications, being chronically online. The second is productive-looking consumption — courses, podcasts, educational content, business advice. I’m not saying all of these are a problem, but they are stealing our attention.
The third is outsourced thinking: using AI to plan, research, organize, and reply to emails instead of actually doing the work. And then there’s a fourth problem, which is simply trying to do too much in the first place. The frustrating part is that all four can leave you feeling completely exhausted at the end of the day, even when you haven’t actually made much progress on the things that matter to you.
What I’m really realizing in my own life is that we don’t have a time problem as much as we think we do. We have an attention problem.
Your Phone Is Making You Exhausted
Let’s talk about mindless consumption first. I was listening to Dr. Becky Kennedy — she’s the Good Inside person — being interviewed on Emma Grede’s podcast, *Aspire with Emma Grede*, talking about how uncomfortable we’ve become with discomfort. One example she gave really shook me to my core: when our kids are upset, sometimes we rush to solve the problem because we want to get back to our phones.
We tell ourselves we’re trying to make our kids feel better, which is absolutely true — but sometimes we’re also just trying to remove an interruption. How often are we trying to get through something so we can get back to scrolling? We’re rushing a conversation with our partner. We’re letting our kid have screen time because, well, how can we have screen time if we don’t let them have screen time?
I don’t consider myself an irritable person, but since reducing my screen time, I’m so much more patient. I still have three hours of screen time and a long way to go — I’d love to get it down to an hour. I do some work on my phone, so I can’t get it to zero, but I’m taking baby steps.
The Blurry Line Between Work and Scrolling
If you work online or own a business, it is so easy to justify being on your phone. There’s always something you could be checking, researching, posting, or responding to. The line between working on your phone and mindlessly scrolling gets blurry really fast — you pick it up to do one thing and suddenly you’ve lost 30 minutes.
I have the Opal app, which is a screen-blocking app that makes you wait five seconds to unblock your apps. The worst part is that sometimes by the time I’ve gone through the whole unblocking process, I get distracted and forget what I originally picked up my phone to do. Then I have to start the whole thing over again.
I have tried pretty much everything to reduce my screen time. I have the Brick, I have Opal, I’ve deleted tempting apps, I’ve tried turning my phone to black and white, and I’ve set screen time limits for myself that I promptly ignore.
What Has Actually Made a Difference
Two things have actually made the biggest difference. The first is making my phone physically harder to access — putting it out of reach, putting it face down. That works well during my workday and at home, though I’ll admit I will still sometimes go upstairs to get it.
The second thing, and probably the one that’s made the biggest difference, is putting things I actually want to do in the places where I would normally scroll. I keep a book beside my spot on the couch and another one by my bed. I’m putting hobby supplies front and center so I’m visually looking at them.
As the holidays approach, I’m also very aware of the things I haven’t used from last holiday season, and I’m thinking, “Okay, I need to use these before next holiday season.” It’s not about post-it reminders telling me to stop touching my phone — it’s about giving myself something to do instead, and that has made a big difference.
Productive-Looking Consumption
Now let’s move on to the other way we’re giving away our attention — one that feels a lot more productive. This is when you’re spending too much time learning and not enough time doing.
Let me be really clear: I love education. I’m not anti-education. I’ve invested a lot in my business, and some of those investments are a huge part of why I’ve been successful. I would never tell someone not to invest in their business.
But I’ve also bought summit upgrades and bundles I’ve literally never opened. I’ve had seasons where I was consuming way more education than I could ever realistically implement. There is something so satisfying about signing up for another course, listening to another business podcast, or watching another training — because you just feel like you’re doing something productive.
If you’re not doing anything with what you’re learning, you’re not being productive. You only get a return on investment from courses or programs — whether you’re investing your time or your money — if you actually do something with what you’re learning.
If you watch a one-hour training, are you spending another hour implementing what you learned, or are you just jumping to another training? If you’re listening to a business podcast in your car, feeling like you’re getting ahead, but you never actually sit down to do the work, what is the point?
It’s worth asking whether we’re spending at least as much time implementing as we are learning. I’m not saying it has to be a rigid rule — one hour watching, one hour implementing — but we do need a useful way to evaluate whether education is actually helping us move forward. You can easily spend your entire work week learning how to grow your business without growing your business.
Discernment Around What You Buy
We also need to be discerning about what we’re investing in — and I mean that sincerely when it comes to both time and money. Quality over quantity. And quality does not necessarily mean an 18-module course.
A great investment should help you solve a very specific problem or develop a skill you actually need. What makes sense also depends on your stage of business, so it’s hard for me to give a blanket statement on what is or isn’t worth investing in.
At my stage of business, if I’m making a significant investment — more than $300 to learn a specific skill — I need personalized feedback about how something applies to my specific business. That said, I still buy lower-ticket offers when I want to learn a specific skill. The YAP challenge, for one — $300 to learn to YAP like Jesse Jean? Yes, please.
There are also seasons when I intentionally take a break from buying education because I know I don’t have time to implement anything new. It just is what it is. It doesn’t mean you’re not growing your business, but you do need to give yourself time to use what you’ve already learned.
AI and the Illusion of Progress
Honestly, I think AI — which we’re going to talk about next — has made this problem even more, let’s call it interesting. Now we can create entire business strategies in 30 seconds and never use any of them, but feel like we’ve created a 102-page document and look how thorough and amazing we are.
I love AI, and I use it constantly in my business. I’ve even built myself a whole second brain where I’m storing ideas, information, and things I want to remember. If you want an episode about how I’ve built one, let me know — I’ve been getting really into it.
The point is, AI can help us do so many incredible things, especially as small business owners who don’t have the marketing budget or amount of time bigger businesses have. But AI also makes it dangerously easy to feel productive without doing anything.
As the new year approaches, I’m already worried about all of you making 27-page business plans for 2027 that you are never going to open again. You can spend hours talking to ChatGPT about your business. You can create an entire content calendar, launch strategy, offer suite, five-year plan, and 47 ideas — before lunch, really.
At the end of that conversation, you feel like you’ve accomplished so much. But you haven’t done anything other than create an enormous list of things you’re now supposed to do. And chances are you’re not going to look at that document again.
There is a real risk that instead of AI helping us move forward faster, we’re using it to stay stuck in the planning phase. We feel like we’re doing everything faster, but we’re trying to do so many things that nothing actually ever gets finished — or if it does, it’s not done particularly well.
AI can help you move faster, but moving faster in 15 different directions is not going to give you the progress you’re looking for. We’ve outsourced our thinking, so we don’t know what to focus on. And that’s a problem.
AI Is Giving Us Too Much To Do
AI is giving us a long to-do list and we are running with it. Not everything deserves your attention. Not every interesting idea is something you need to act on, and not every piece of advice needs to land on your to-do list.
Everyone is launching software now. I get it — it’s tempting, and so many tools look amazing. Every new tool promises to save us time and make us more money, but sometimes it’s just adding more work. Because we’re constantly consuming information, we’re not slowing down enough to make good decisions about how we’re spending our time.
One decision-making filter I always come back to — and I’ve talked about this in my goals episode — is asking myself: will future me be happy that I committed to this? Is this actually something I want? Do I have the time and capacity to follow it through, or am I doing it because it sounds interesting and I don’t want to miss out?
Committing to What You Want
I just finished a book called *Be Your Future Self Now*, and one thing the author said that I absolutely loved is this: when you commit to what you want, it makes everything you don’t want easier to say no to.
But so often we don’t commit. We don’t plant a flag and say, “I want X, Y, Z for my business.” We flip-flop, we’re wishy-washy, and we’re easily swayed when we see someone popping up on Instagram who seemingly has it all. It becomes, “Ooh, I want that — maybe I should do what she’s doing.”
The point the book makes — I’ll link to it in the show notes — is that when you commit clearly to exactly what you want, everything else is a no. Everything else just is what it is.
The Instagram Decision
A concrete example of this is when I stopped posting on Instagram. Nobody told me it was a good idea. In fact, many people told me it was not a good idea. But when I looked at the data, Instagram wasn’t pulling its weight.
I knew the kind of life I wanted and the kind of business I wanted, and Instagram wasn’t fitting that picture. It was also asking a lot from me personally — I was re-watching my stories, checking how posts performed, spending hours thinking of the perfect hooks.
Instagram wasn’t contributing enough to justify the time and attention I was giving it, and stepping away was the right decision for my business. In the spirit of this whole conversation about what’s stealing your time, I would be remiss not to say: you have to be willing to make decisions that make sense for you, even when they go against what everyone else is doing.
Protecting Your Ability to Think
I don’t want this to sound like I’m telling you to throw your phone in a ditch, quit every course, and never use ChatGPT again. I’m not doing any of those things. I want to keep learning and I want to grow my business.
But I also deeply want to protect my ability to think. I want to be able to sit down and read a book without checking my phone. I want to be more patient with my kid and not make bad decisions because some part of me wants to get back to scrolling.
To be clear, I never consciously thought that — no part of me ever thought, “I need to fix this problem quickly so I can get back to my phone.” It was only when I heard it on a podcast that I had a genuine gasp moment.
At the end of the day, we have to protect our brains. We want to be able to focus on something without it taking five times longer because we’re distracted, and we want to actually enjoy the life we’ve worked so hard to build. Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have, and we need to be a whole lot more careful about what we’re giving it to.
If this one hit close to home, subscribe to The Kara Report so you catch every episode as soon as it drops. We talk about the real stuff — what’s actually working, what’s worth your attention, and what you can probably let go of.
Links Mentioned
- Read the full shownotes: https://thekarareport.com/142
- My private podcast on search-driven marketing: https://thekarareport.com/private-podcast
- Podcast with Emma Grede & Dr Becky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugx2vOnxWdY
- Want to start a digital garden? This is the Youtube video I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tY7Z53QJo8
- Learn more about working with our team: https://thekarareport.com/services
- Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thekarareport
