Focus!
Redefinition of a dirty word
Last week I did Biz Boost with my mentor Tash Corbin. It’s a week of giving attention to specific elements of business to create momentum, and mate, did it shift the dial for me.
Boosting my Big CEO Energy on Day 1 reminded me I am the Mistress of my life and business, and helped me plant my feet on the hill I’m choosing to die on 😏 But boosting Creation on Day 2 shook me in the best way.
A primary struggle I have in my business is sitting down to create assets and content. And in our mini-lecture/group discussion on Creation, one of the things Tash spoke about was phone and AI use.
I fact-checked this: in 2023, reviews.org conducted a survey that reported Americans checking their phone 344 times per day - that’s every 4 minutes. It’s slowed down in 2025 at 205 times per day or every 6 minutes. If you have an iPhone, you can check this under Settings > Screen Time. I check mine on average 40-50 times a day, that's about 4 times an hour, and my weekly average is about 4-5 hours use a day. I feel scattered enough with that, I shudder to think what my mind would be like if I tripled the amount of times I check my phone!
This UChicago article from 2017(!) talks about how just having your phone in your presence reduces your cognitive capacity and working memory.
And after using LLMs over three sessions, our brains start to lose creative, analytical and critical thinking functionality. This 2025 study explores the neural and behavioural consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). The more external help that was given, be it by LLM or a search engine, the less brain connectivity was witnessed.
Essentially, the folks using LLMs for essay-writing couldn’t remember what they’d written, they weren’t engaging their critical analysis or creativity as much, and their essays were "statistically more homogenous. They were also more likely to follow the suggested “thinking” path that was presented by the LLM; most were happy to follow its constructed (and manipulatable) lead". The outcome didn’t tell us to abandon it but to be very strategic in its use, otherwise we lose neural, linguistic and behavioural function that will be hard to recover.
TLDR; For myself and soo many of my recently diagnosed neurocomplex humans who already struggle with executive function and memory, phone use makes this worse and LLM use compounds that struggle immensely, despite the fact we are using to to help with those things. The irony is real.
Now, I don’t use LLMs, for many reasons. But the morning of Day 2 of Biz Boost, I had spent an hour in bed on IG, and when it came time to create an asset, I couldn’t think anything, and then when I finally came up with an idea, I couldn’t see how it fit with my business ecosystem - it felt like a shiny object rather than cohesive in my developing body of work.
So after this experience, I used my Big CEO energy and made a commitment - on non-session days, to not check my phone AT ALL until after my work is done for the day, and only for client messages on session days.
I usually sleep with the phone in another room, and use an analog clock for my alarm. But on Day 3, I didn’t check it until after midday. I woke up and wrote half a dozen pages in my notebook, did my movement practice, watched the sunrise, ate food. The day flowed and I felt more nourished and settled, and was way more productive.
The urge to check it was immense; part of the device design, part avoidance of something that feels ‘hard’, which I’ll say more on another time. But I continued to redirect myself back to what I was doing, and at the end of the day, I had mental energy remaining, and a sense of continuity of time; perspective of what I’d achieved for the day and what was coming tomorrow, in a way that is not always available, as someone who lives a nomadic life and works for myself, where most days are different.
I’ve continued the experiment, and my brain has spent days and days zinging and pinging with a backlog of creative ideas; synthesis and maps bursting through, with the capacity to sort the ideas and see if they actually fit with what I want to do in my business and what my clients need.
And with that Big CEO energy commitment to give myself space to create, I’ve been able to draft a month’s worth of content, that I hope will actually be useful, or at least entertaining and enjoyable for you to read. And I made myself cry today, with joy, with what’s emerging in my business, because I’ve given it the space to come through. I really hope it inspires you when you see it over the next month or so.
This feels liberating. And it also feels like I want to redefine ‘focus’ for myself.
For a long time, the only way I knew how to focus was to hyperfocus - to gear myself up for a deep dive, to narrow my vision onto one thing and tunnel into it until it was done, driven by a subtle yet sharp quality of panic in case I was interrupted, and therefore unable to reach this state again and see the thing through.
But this experiment has shown me in focusing that way, I miss out on so much of the brilliance of my brain. Narrowing my focus doesn’t help me connect to the bigger picture, to what people need, to the sensorial imaginal information that’s available in collective consciousness, to the web of life substance that is constantly informing and migrating us into new experiences.
A narrow focus limits the conditions of my creativity - if I don't have the time or the space or the energy to focus narrowly, then it’s impossible and I can’t do the work.
When I tunnel my vision and focus hard on an outcome, I miss out on the myriad of possibilities and the ability to choose the precise words, information and energy that really meets people.
I read somewhere that our attention is the most valuable commodity in the capitalist tech era. And when my attention is on devices and programs that are designed to distract me, I enter a less connected state of being and give my attention a direction that doesn't serve me or anyone else in my world.
I'm done distracting myself away from the hard things, and with being coerced into behaving in ways that serve the tech overlords.
But instead of saying ‘focus’, I’d rather say, I commit to a nourishing direction for my big beautiful brain to place its attention. I commit to creating a wider mental sensorial container for information to move through, to find joy in the way the data finds its shapes and patterns. And instead of overwhelm, I commit to finding awe and wonder in the myriad ways this data could be applied and expressed; the innumerable threads of connection available for weaving.
And start weaving.
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Do you have something you want to create in your business or life? If you don't already do this, I invite you to join me in not checking your phone, just for the first hour of the day - for the next day, or even the next week.
If you need an alarm, get an analog clock, or if the noise is too much, those LED lights that can fade on and off at a certain time as your alarm. Those lights are amazing.
Let me know how it goes, how you feel and what happens differently within that time and ‘focus’ you made available.
PS. It probably sounds weird for me to invite you to spend less time on the device when I’m writing things I hope you will read on the very same device. Less time on the phone means a necessary digital declutter is usually pending, because we often see we are really not missing out on much. But if reclaiming your attention and creativity and critical thinking means you read less of my emails, GOOD. I'd rather there be more creativity and critical thinking brains in the world.
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