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A friend of mine sent a message in a group chat: “Is AI making anybody else’s ADHD symptoms feel worse?” I get what she means. Let’s kick off a conversation about why AI makes us feel this way and what we can do about it. And as with everything AI, this is new, so feel free to reach out with your own thoughts, suggestions, and strategies!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- “When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry” – Harvard Business Review, March 5, 2026, Julie Bedard et al. (behind paywall)
- Join the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright
Links you might enjoy:
- ✨ The full Bright Method™️ program: If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time – and their peace of mind.
- 🌿 Free 3-Day Time Management Program: Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
- 📱Follow me on Instagram: Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women – like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
Full Transcript:
Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.
Hey, hey, and welcome back. [00:01:00] All right, today we are gonna talk about the increased scattered feeling that you might be feeling if you have been digging into AI and using it at work or maybe in your personal life as well. And this came up because a friend messaged a group chat. She has ADHD, and she said, “Is AI making anybody else’s ADHD symptoms feel worse?”
And I chatted with her about it, and she was like, “You should do a podcast episode about that.” So here we are. Now, I don’t have any special ADHD training, so I definitely just… A huge disclaimer on that. These are just my thoughts on this topic as someone who works with women on feeling scattered and trying to move past feeling scattered, and why I think AI really is causing this feeling.
I think it’s very legitimate. Whether or not you have ADHD, I think we all feel more scattered when we spend a lot of time with it, and I wanna talk about why that is and then what we could do about it. [00:02:00] At least, you know, experiment with trying to do it. All of it is so new, but I think it’s really worth trying to get at this and be intentional around it, um, in a way that can help us.
Because I really feel it. You know, on days that I go deep on it in my business, I end the day feeling more scattered and exhausted. It’s this, like, weird combination of hyper-focusing on some things at times, and then also feeling like I’m multitasking on a few things at the same time, which I don’t enjoy doing, uh, but it is what it is.
It is how I feel when it comes to AI. And also, sometimes I think what’s weird is I end up somewhere… Like, I can look up after who knows how long of a period of time, and I’m kinda somewhere that I didn’t intend to be, and I have to, like, work to remember why, what was my original intent with this project today when I opened up Claude this morning?
That kind of stuff. It can be, like, a real, like, disorienting feeling on a lot of levels. Like, why am I here? What else is going on in my life? Like, it gets really strange. And so let’s talk about this. [00:03:00] Now, before I dig into it too much, I happen to be reading, um, Harvard Business Review, and there was an article in there called “When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry,” and they’re calling it AI brain fry.
It’s a March 5th, 2026 article. Julie Bedard and others co-wrote it, and I will link it in the show notes. It is behind a paywall, but I find it very interesting if you are interested in this type of topic, so definitely check it out. And one of the things that it’s saying is that AI is not simplifying work.
It is intensifying it. And a quote in it that I thought was interesting from someone that was in this study that they ran was, this guy said, “I end each day exhausted, not from the work itself, but from managing the work. Six work trees open, four half-written features, two quick fixes that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.”
And I just think it echoes a lot of the feelings I’ve had when I go deep on AI on a certain day. [00:04:00]
And so again, just a nudge that I’m gonna reference this article a few times, but I’m gonna kind of give you like a skim version of only certain points. And so if you are interested in it, definitely check that out. Okay, so let’s talk about this. Uh, again, I wanted to talk about, like, kind of what I view as causing this and then what we can do about it.
But as with everything AI, it’s all so new, it’s gonna be a bit of an experiment, and it’s the beginning of a conversation that I could see around this. Okay, so first thing I find that causes this feeling is the multitasking that happens when you’re waiting for AI to respond, like to do its, like, running and get back to you.
Obviously, sometimes the response time is short enough that you don’t get distracted, or not even get distracted. It’s more like sometimes we put things in there that’s gonna take, you know, 5 to 15 to 20 minutes to run, and you’re not gonna sit there and just stare at it the whole time. So, like, it’s not even like you’re getting distracted.
It’s like you’re intentionally opting to go do something else ‘cause you know something’s gonna take a while. [00:05:00] But there’s this, like, open loop in the background, so you kind of feel like you’re multitasking when you turn to that second thing.
And I don’t think the answer is don’t multitask and just stare at the Claude screen as it, like, spins at you. That’s not, I think, realistic. But I also think it’s helpful to have somewhat of a game plan in your mind so that you don’t spend that time feeling, like, stretched too thin, scrolling, getting lost and scrolling on Instagram, but then coming back to AI and being lost there.
I mean, it’s just, it’s a lot. It can be, like, weird feelings, and again, we’re new at this, trying to figure out the game plan.
One potential approach I think is worth experimenting with, and is something I’m going to be experimenting with, is trying to intentionally leave AI to run, remind myself to come back, and have a somewhat clear game plan of what I’m going to do during that time before I come back. [00:06:00] Now, I wanna note, Claude will say like, “Do you want me to notify you?”
I have hit yes, and I’ve never been, like, all that notified. It might have to do with how I’ve set up notifications and that kind of stuff, so who knows? But for me, what I think I need is to guesstimate how long it’s going to take and set a phone timer, and just, you know, come back to Claude so that I don’t, you know, forget about it for an hour, and then I’m like, “Ah, yeah, I forgot to be doing that thing,” and now things are pulled in a different direction.
I don’t have time to finish that up. If I wanna come back to something in the period of time when I think it’s gonna run, I think setting a phone timer is probably pretty smart in this department. If you don’t wanna open up your phone, totally fine. Activate Siri or whatever voice command you have, set a, you know, AI timer, and then that way you don’t have to, like, open up your phone and get sucked into that.
But I think that’s step one in helping me move into something else, but know I’m gonna come back. In addition, and I’ve always found this helpful: if I have to interrupt a task for anything — you know, in my lawyer days, someone swung by the office, somebody called my phone, whatever it is — I would say, “Yeah, happy to chat with you. Give me a minute.” [00:07:00] And I would write down what I think of as next step notes. So it’s kind of like, okay, this is what I was gonna do next on this original project. These were the next steps that I was going to take. Then I get interrupted, I talk to this other person, whatever it is. When I come back to that task, I have clarity about what I was gonna do.
It’s almost like setting up the on-ramp back on for myself. I’ve always found that incredibly useful, and I think the same stands here. If you have AI spinning on something, you’re not sure how long it’s gonna take, you set the timer for how long you think it might take. And then if you want to, if it’s not clear from the conversation, you could jot down your next step notes of where you think you might wanna take it.
And then the other element of this is I would make my second task — the one I’m doing while I’m waiting for Claude to finish — somewhat easily interruptible. [00:08:00] I would have the clarity around: I do email, or I do Slack, or I clean up my desk, or I… Whatever an easily interruptible task would be for you, that’s what I would choose to do.
That’s not when I would open up, you know, some other, like, heavy lift intellectual thing, because you know you’re getting interrupted. You know you’re getting interrupted in five minutes or 15 minutes, and so I just think that that would serve you well to pick something that’s, like, easily interruptible for you.
I do wanna note before I move on to the next topic that I hear often in the productivity, time management space that people are like, “Context switching is bad. It takes you 23 minutes to come back to a task.” I have never been fully convinced by that. The study that people often cite to is a study that basically observed people at work and said when they are interrupted, it tends to take them 23 minutes-ish, like 23 to 25 minutes to come back to the task. [00:09:00]
It didn’t say your brain requires 23 minutes to ease back into a task. Like, it doesn’t take us 23 minutes to gear up to do any task, and, like, we know that. Like, me saying that, if you really think about, you know, your life, it doesn’t actually play out that way.
So I just throw that out there that, like, to me, context switching in and of itself is not bad if you have clarity around what you’re leaving, how you might come back to it if it’s incomplete, what you’re doing, and then coming back to that other thing or, you know, going to the next thing.
That’s not to say that context switching has no, like, con to it. I think there are studies that show that there’s, like, I think it’s called, like, attention residue, that your attention kind of stays on task one when you switch to task two to some degree. But I believe, and this is not — like, I’m not a scientist, you know, I don’t read research papers for fun. I’m not, like, deep, deep, deep into the research. [00:10:00] But my understanding of the research is that attention residue increases when you are pulled away from an incomplete task, and it just is kind of, like, hanging over you because you’re worried, you know, who knows why?
But it’s like, I’m not sure I’m gonna get back to it, or I’m still thinking about where I was. And to me, again, if I can have clarity of, let me set this to bed with my next step notes, I can come back to it with an easier on-ramp. I have clarity about what I’m doing. I have clarity that I’m gonna come back to task one because of that timer.
All of that can help you context switch with as little, you know, downside as possible.
So again, just to reorient, we’re talking about why using AI creates feelings of being more scattered. I think one of the reasons — the first reason — is the multitasking that happens while you wait for AI to run. Again, not every time you give it a prompt or, you know, question or part of the conversation, but sometimes, you know, something’s gonna run for two, three, five, 15 minutes more, and we’re just sitting there waiting. [00:11:00] I don’t think the answer is to just stare at it and try and single focus on that.
But how do we switch you to doing something else with your workday, but in a way that makes the most sense, that decreases the feeling of feeling scattered and that cost of context switching? And I think that this approach makes sense to me and is worth experimenting with. And again, the approach would be: let AI run, set a timer when you’re gonna come back to it, jot down any next step notes if you need them, if it’s not clear from where you are, and then move to a second task that’s easily interruptible.
Could be email, could be Slack and Teams, could be cleaning up your desk, could be push-ups if you wanna do something physical, could be texting if you’re bad at texts like I am, like using that time to text with people. Um, could be Marco Polo-ing a friend. I’m not — like it doesn’t have to be anything, but I think having the clarity and maybe a menu of things that work for you in those moments would help a lot. [00:12:00]
Major point being it’s an easily interruptible thing. You’re not gonna be annoyed when the alarm goes off in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes because you went into it and picked an activity knowing you were gonna be interrupted. All right. Second reason that I think we feel more scattered when it comes to AI — and then talking about what to do with it — is just the exhaustion it causes.
The HBR article I was talking about talked about that there’s just this, like, cognitive exhaustion from how intensified work has become with AI, and, like, the management of the work and the increased output of information. All of these things that we know. Like, when you really — if you’ve been using AI a lot, particularly at work — the amount of output it can give you is overwhelming, and I feel that way, and I’m just basically overseeing my own use of AI, not a team’s use of AI, and, like, all the output from a team. [00:13:00]
So it just makes sense that we’re exhausted from managing more work and overseeing more output and reading all the output and all this type of stuff. So it makes a ton of sense, and when we are tired, we just feel more scattered. It’s harder to make decisions. It’s harder to keep, like, track of what’s going on in the sense of, like, what the purpose is of what we’re doing and that kind of stuff.
I think that applies to everybody, and I know from talking with a client with ADHD, she said, you know, she feels her best on the ADHD front when the basics are hit, when she feels like she’s eating well, when she’s moving her body, and when she’s sleeping well. And so it makes sense that when at least one of those things is not in play — like the sleep, uh, even if your sleep is kind of there, it’s like the exhaustion feeling — it’s gonna exacerbate things.
And I think whether we have ADHD or not, people understand that. [00:14:00] It just might be varying degrees of effect and impact, but it makes sense that we struggle. And so in terms of what we can do here, I think that a lot of this goes hand in hand. Um, I’m gonna talk about, like, three buckets of things, and you were on bucket number two. But hopefully also some of those solutions in the other buckets help. But in addition, I think it really is important to take a break from AI. And this can vary by person, it can vary by your job and how much you have to be in AI.
But I do think that having breaks from AI is really important. And I say this because I think some people are like, “Yeah, I’d love a break from AI.” But a lot of us — at least for me, especially that first month of really getting into it with my business — it’s somewhat addictive. It’s somewhat like shiny object syndrome.
It’s somewhat fun to play with and, like, see what you can do with it. And I think that I burned myself out a little bit on it initially, and I’ve now found a better happy medium where I’m not using it all the time. [00:15:00] I’m taking breaks from it. I can go full days without using it. I think that’s a good balance.
And so if you are, you know, not in that place, or you’re in the shiny object, like, addictive side of it, or you just have to be in it more for work, trying to carve out some time where you’re not is great. Like, not using it on the weekends, not using it one day a weekend, not using it one workday a week.
Like, not using it before a certain time. If your energy is really good and you get a lot done in the morning, like, not using AI during that period of time. I think being intentional with giving yourself breaks from it is really… I’ve just felt the benefits of it, and so I share that in case it helps you. The last element of this was touched on in that HBR article, but is definitely something I was relating to before reading that, is that feeling of like you look up and you feel kind of lost.
You’re like, “How did I get here? Like, I logged into Claude for this, and now I’m over here.” [00:16:00]
And I have two thoughts on this one that I hope are helpful. The first is I think it’s really important before you even start talking to Claude is to write down what you’re there for. And, you know, maybe write it on a Post-it Note, stick it to your computer, write it down on a piece of paper near you.
Have something that’s like, “This is what I’m working on with Claude right now,” or, “This is what I’m going to,” whatever AI platform you use right now, “to start working on,” so that you have that, like, touchstone of what you’re doing. Because the problem is, you know, we dig in, and then we mention one other little thing, and then Claude offers to, like, chase that down, and then it offers to do, like, three more things.
And some of that’s valuable, but often we can, like, be way over in left field and be like, “Whoa, how did we get here so far?” And one of my friends, Jennifer of eighthdayformom, was saying this.
She’s like, “The tricky part of being a manager with AI is now my team can go in a, like, direction I didn’t want them to go very quickly.” [00:17:00] And I think that happens to us individually as well. It’s like suddenly you’re way over there. You’re like, “How am I over here?” And also, I spent an hour or two hours getting over here when really I wanted to be over there.
And I think that’s important to keep in mind. So two things on that. One is, again, that Post-it Note or whatever it is of like, “This is what I’m doing right now,” so that every, you know, few minutes as you’re working with AI, you can kinda bring yourself back to, like, what’s the outcome that I’m looking for here? What’s going on? And sometimes, yes, like going, following the rabbit trail is a good thing to do because it might have flagged something you hadn’t thought of, and it’s an important point, and it’ll make it better. That’s great. But often we just, we wanna make sure we’re doing that intentionally and have clarity around why we’re doing that and how we’ll come back.
And so I just throw that out there. Another one is asking your AI system not to offer you so many things at the end. I find that Claude or any AI platform might be like, “Do you want me to chase down these five things?” [00:18:00] Like, we kind of wrap up one topic, and then it’s like, “We can do these five other things,” and you’re like, “Okay, let’s do those five other things.”
And you can actually ask Claude, “Hey, I need you to help me focus. I need you to help me stay on task. Please don’t offer those things unless” — you know, you could give it some criteria if you want — “please save this to your memory so that it’s in every conversation.” You might have to remind it occasionally, but I just think that you can train Claude, or any AI platform, of how you want it to interact with you.
And if you have a tendency to, you know, chase down rabbit holes that it offers you, maybe ask it to help you avoid that so you can stay on task. I think that could be something that’s really worth trying out. All right. That’s what I have for you today. I, again, I think this is, you know, the beginning of a lot of conversations around time management, attention management, energy management around AI, and so I see this conversation continuing. [00:19:00]
I would love to know what you think. You know, again, we’re all learning in real time. So if you do something that you find to be very valuable that I didn’t touch on, I would love to hear about it. I just — I think, you know, AI is here, and a lot of us have to use it at work or want to use it at work to help us, but we also, if we can manage the downsides of it, it’s certainly worth doing, as with anything.
Like, you know, being more intentional when it comes to our time and energy is great. And so, again, I would love to hear what you think. I do wanna note, just a random side note about AI, I will say, and I know I’m biased because of what I do, but I’ve talked to other people about it, and at least some people echo what I’m thinking, so I think it’s worth sharing, that I will say I’m leaning into AI a lot for a variety of things, both in business and in my personal life.
There’s a lot that I’m leaning into. I am still not sold on using it in my calendar. I find that when it is easier and faster to throw things into my calendar, I don’t, uh, like it. [00:20:00] I don’t like how I’m not thinking through things as well. I’m not seeing where things land in the same way. So I’m not seeing how those, you know, things that I’m putting in my calendar interact with other things. I don’t see like, “Oh, yeah, I need to do that, and I need to do that around that time, but whoa, that landed on a day that my kids are home,” and, you know, do you know what I mean?
Like, it just doesn’t… Throwing things in the calendar too easily, I think there’s a bit of danger in that. I feel that way even about Apple Reminders, um, Google Tasks. A lot of these things you can just, like, put things in the calendar a little too easily.
And I think there’s, you know, danger in letting things just fly in there. Um, I also think it doesn’t… We need to slow down to prioritize, to eliminate, to delegate, all these types of things. And I have just not yet — and I’m not ruling it out, but not yet — found an amazing way to work with AI on my calendar that doesn’t lose the benefits of slowing down to manually do some stuff in my calendar. [00:21:00]
So take it or leave it. I just wanted to throw that out there ‘cause I think it’s interesting. And again, this is all a conversation, so if you disagree with me, if you agree with me, if you have some, you know, different take on it, I would love, love, love to hear, because I’m open to being challenged here.
I am working on incorporating AI into parts of the Bright Method to help clients, but I’m also resisting incorporating it in some ways because I’m like, going fast and, you know, quick and dirty and like that kind of stuff when it comes to your calendar is often how we end up in that overcommitted, scattered place.
And so I’ve been resisting incorporating it in certain ways within the Bright Method because of that as well. So anyway, that was a random aside, but I would love to hear what you think on that. All right. When this is coming out, enrollment for some upcoming programs — I don’t know which start dates will be sold out or not, but enrollment should be open, at least for October, I believe, when this comes out, if September has sold out. [00:22:00]
If not, September’s open as well. Let me know if you have any questions. You can go to kellynolan.com/bright to read all about it, but if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out. Happy to chat with you, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
Links you might enjoy:
✨ The full Bright Method™️ program If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.
🌿 Free 5-Day Time Management Program Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
📱 Follow me on Instagram Get bite-sized, real-life
