When AI Becomes a Time Suck
I sat down last Tuesday to knock out a quick social caption. Fifteen minutes, tops. That was my plan.
Forty-five minutes later I had eleven versions, not one of them meaningfully better than the second, and that strange feeling that I had been very busy but hadn’t actually finished a single important thing.
Sound familiar?
Here's the irony that stopped me: I reach for AI to save time. And that morning it had quietly swallowed forty-five minutes of my one and only Tuesday. The tool I use to buy back hours had become the thing spending them.
In my last two posts and AI, I wrote about the questions AI can't answer and the ones it shouldn't. Today I’m thinking about how a tool built to make us faster and more efficient can actually make us slower and way less efficient.
Because AI doesn't waste your time the way the old distractions do. Scrolling feels like slacking; you know you're avoiding your work. A rabbit hole with AI feels like work. You're producing. You're refining. You're "being thorough." And the whole time the returns are shrinking and the clock is running, and you don't feel guilty, because look how productive you're being.
I coach a lot of brilliant, driven women, and I'm watching this show up everywhere. One client told me she'd spent an entire evening "using AI to plan her quarter." When I asked what she'd decided, she went quiet. She hadn't decided anything. She'd generated six gorgeous frameworks and chosen none of them. Another told me she spent a big chunk of her weekend trying to figure out how to get AI to schedule meetings for her: “if I can just figure it out, I know it will save me a lot of time.” Will it? Really? I’m skeptical and she’ll never get that gorgeous spring weekend back.
I've started naming the specific traps, because naming them helps me catch them:
The endless polish: asking for a tenth version of something the third version already nailed.
The over-consulting: running a decision past AI that I could have made in ten seconds by trusting myself.
The research spiral: one more search, one more angle, one more "actually, can you also..." until an hour is gone and I'm no closer to acting.
In every one of these, the extra effort feels productive but it doesn’t actually move the needle.
Here's the truth: AI removes the friction that used to force us to stop. A blank page was hard, so we'd write the thing and move on. A finished draft was finished, because starting over was a pain. Now we can generate infinitely, tweak infinitely, ask infinitely. And infinite options are not a gift when you have a life to live and a day that actually ends.
So I've added a second question to my little AI kit. (The first, from my last post, was "Is the doing of this the point?") The new one is even simpler: Is this actually saving me time? Or, would this task be faster if I just trust myself and do it myself?
The moment the honest answer turns to no — when I'm on version seven, or the third follow-up prompt, or twenty minutes into "researching" something I could settle by trusting my gut — that's my cue to close the laptop and make the decision myself.
And yup … I let AI create the image that accompanies this post because images are hard for me and take a ton of time. I asked for one image that captures the vibe and went with it.