Cornerstones, Part 3: The Alchemies
Tap here to jump down to the TL;DR
Over the past two weeks we've gathered our Oracles to help us make decisions and preserve our energy, then added Commencements to get us on the right track, stacking up tiny wins one step at a time. But what about when things feel emotionally impossible, torturously boring, or we're crushed by the weight of perfectionism?
For those, we need a different kind of magic. Our final Cornerstone, The Alchemies.
Alchemy is about transformation. While our other Cornerstones focused on externalizing our processes to beat executive dysfunction, The Alchemies are designed to shift our internal perspective, transforming anxiety into curiosity, dread into playfulness, and overwhelm into empowerment. The Alchemies help us leverage our strengths to support our vulnerabilities.
Let's lock in this final set of tools.
The Alchemies
Cognitive reframing techniques that help us turn have-to into get-to.
The Anchor
When it comes to the really boring stuff—folding laundry, doing dishes, yardwork —I struggle with consistency (a word I hate). For a long time, I couldn't figure out how these perpetual tasks could feel so impossible. But, thanks to The Anthropologist, I have a new favorite tool for this specific struggle: The Anchor.
A side effect of certain executive dysfunctions is what feels like difficulty with object permanence, the formal term for "out of sight, out of mind." While object permanence issues are not clinically recognized as a symptom of ADHD, the combination of poor concentration and general forgetfulness can produce similar effects. This partly explains our reliance on external stimuli, like routines and reminders, to keep important things top of mind.
You may be familiar with this phenomenon, but something it took me a very long time to realize is that it often extends to people. I want to have regular chats to keep up with certain friends and family, but I am terrible at making it happen when I don't see or hear from them often enough to remind me how good it feels to connect.
The Anchor is a simple Alchemy that uses the presence of another person to ground a wandering mind. It’s body doubling, but I like to think of it as having a friendly anchor that keeps me from floating away from a boring task.
I didn't believe in the power of The Anchor until my Grandma called me to catch up one day while I was doing dishes (one of my most abhorred chores). I continued what I was doing while we chatted and before I knew it they were all done! Now I will save my laundry folding for an afternoon goss with my favorite aunt, hop into a co-working session like Medium's Weekly Writing Hour or Hayley Honeyman's Power Hour, and even use a Discord sprint-bot to hype me up and track my word count.
So call a friend to chat while you fold laundry, or work silently alongside a colleague in a coffee shop. Their presence provides a gentle, external accountability that makes it easier to stay on task. It's the ultimate two-for-one deal —you get your task done and you get to connect with someone you care about.
The Magic Mirror
Borrowed from Ali Abdaal's book Feel Good Productivity, it can take a little practice, but this is one of the most powerful incantations you can use.
When a task feels like pure drudgery, I hold up The Magic Mirror to it and ask one question: What if this were fun?
The goal isn't to find a "correct" answer, but to give your brain permission to be absurd. What if you narrate your activities like a nature documentary host? Or put on a specific "adventure-vibes" soundtrack to answer emails? Maybe light enough candles on your desk to make it feel like you're paying tribute to the gods of attention? (Just set a reminder to yourself to blow them out!)
For those with brains less prone to absurdity, consider your strengths and the things you enjoy.
Reading something very boring? Try using a text-to-speech application to listen to it in an interesting voice instead. (I give Snoop Dogg all the credit for getting me through The Communist Manifesto)
Are you competitive? Employ gamification techniques like The Scoreboard or The Speed Run and shoot for a new record each day.
If you're drawn to storytelling and narratives, immerse yourself in a Quest, using an Oracle to decide your fate —and if you crave connection, community, plus maybe a little treat, lean into body-doubling by running errands with a friend.
The Mirror doesn't change the task, but it can magically transform your approach to it.
The Curse Breaker: Do it (badly) on purpose
Perfectionism (or as I call it, The Inspector) possesses a potent curse, making you believe that if you can't do something perfectly, or don't feel confident that the first attempt will be just right, you shouldn't bother trying at all. It comes in to check your progress and keeps you tweaking one little piece over and over again, always moving the goalposts at the last second, never allowing you to feel satisfied with your work.
The Curse Breaker is a powerful spell designed to shatter that all-or-nothing thinking, and the instruction is simple: do it badly on purpose.
Write an awful first draft (no one but you has to see it!). Wash only the forks (I'm partial to spoons, myself). Vacuum one room and then just leave the vacuum where you stopped. Put a basic project plan together knowing that it's going to evolve.
By giving yourself explicit permission to be imperfect, you break the curse and, more often than not, find the freedom to get whatever it is to "good enough."
The Curse Breaker helps us remember that, in almost every case, "good enough and done" can be iterated into "exactly what it needs to be."
The Cliffhanger
We often think of attention residue as a bad thing, but this alchemy cleverly weaponizes it for our own good.
It's a cognitive trick you play on your future self, leveraging a psychological principle called the Zeigarnik Effect (the brain's tendency to remember unfinished tasks).
When you have to stop a task but are dreading coming back to it, don't stop at a clean endpoint, leave on a cliffhanger instead. Stop mid-sentence. Stop with three socks left to fold. Leave an "open loop" that your brain will feel a nagging desire to close later, making it much easier to re-engage.
While The Cliffhanger is a sound strategy with physical tasks like household chores, for cognitive and digital tasks (and inattentive ADHD types) where you will not bump into a physical reminder that prompts you to continue, it's critical to keep a log of your intentionally open loops in a single place (a reminder app, a pocket notebook, sticky notes on a whiteboard, etc) so that you don't lose track of them. Especially if your day-to-day involves a lot of task-switching that you can't control.
The Satellite
A practical exercise that draws from evidence based therapies, philosophical viewpoints like stoicism, and what we know about the ADHD nervous system, to help us zoom out and gain the perspective we need to reconnect to our why (or realize we don't need to).
The Satellite creates strategic distance when a task feels meaningless, frustrating, or when we feel lost, maybe even disconnected from a sense of purpose. It allows us to zoom out and either see how this one annoying thing connects to our larger goals, values, and projects, or how in the grand scheme of things it actually doesn't matter. For me, the latter is comforting when I am struggling with perfectionism, or when I'm emotionally exhausted and tend to catastrophize trivial things.
I take a deep breath and settle my body, then close my eyes and imagine my consciousness is connected to a satellite focused all the way in, observing just me. Then I slowly zoom out of my room, my house, my town, and so on until I'm looking at the earth. Glowing brightly, my favorite color, or shrouded in mesmerizing swirls of gorgeous weather patterns.
Sometimes this is when I realize that not everything has to be connected to my why, and other times I see the connection before I even leave the house.
If this exercise doesn't make sense to you, instead of examining yourself try examining your project. Zoom out from the task you're working on to its broader context or connection to a goal, if you can't seem to locate this connection it may be worth taking a moment to evaluate whether the task is necessary at all.
This isn't so easy when the project isn't yours or doesn't pursue a goal you can connect with, in those cases we circle back around to the why of it all. If you love your job maybe it's just this task you hate, take a moment to consider alternative ways to get it done, if you don't love your job maybe you're just there to make money so you can eat and have a place to live.
Well that last bit sounds terrible, Remy, what the hell?
Dear reader, I'm not here to lie to you, and the reality is that sometimes things are terrible. But when "I'm just here because I need to feed my pets" is the space I land on, the thing that weirdly makes me feel better is that nothing lasts forever. The Roman Empire is my Roman Empire and that little shift zooms me all the way back in to "what will I miss when this changes?", a gentle reminder to refocus on the art of savoring.
Recent psychological research highlights "savoring" and having a "balanced time perspective" as two key factors in our overall well-being. By zooming out to a cosmic scale we cultivate a balanced time perspective, and by zooming back in we engage in a powerful act of connecting with the present. This research also showed that savoring can improve life satisfaction by helping us create that balanced view of time, offering a framework we can use to find value in difficult seasons.
The Anthropologist
Anthropology is the study of human behavior. When I was 12 it was my dream job (yeah, I have always been like this) because I was fascinated by the ways people are different, the ways we are the same, and why. I didn't end up following that path, but I never stopped observing my own behavior in pursuit of understanding what makes me, Me.
When I read "Tiny Experiments" by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff earlier this year, I felt incredibly seen by her chapter on self-anthropology.
By shifting from a first-person participant to a third-person observer, we create a sense of curiosity and distance that lowers the emotional stakes and makes life feel more like a game of discovery. This technique, known in psychology as "self-distancing", encourages us to adopt a third-person point of view even in the language we use for self-talk and note-taking.
If you're struggling, or just a curious type, try The Anthropologist on for a day or two. Observe your behavior without judgement, take literal notes of your activities, emotions, energy levels, and anything else that seems worth recording. Then see what you can learn from those findings. Do any patterns you didn't expect emerge? Might it make sense to align your daily routine with the natural rhythms of your attention, emotional capacity, and quantity of spoons for the day?
The ability to harness this perspective has resulted in realizations that profoundly affected my life and relationships. It's the reason I play video games and try to do big chores in the morning, how I realized that I prefer swimming to running, why I write in different areas of my home depending on the weather, and I would even go as far as to say it is ultimately how I ended up here in the first place.
The true power of an Alchemy is that it's an internal shift, rather than an external tool. It doesn't require a coin or a timer, just a willingness to take a deep breath and look at things, including yourself, from a slightly different angle. Mindfully transforming your perspective can empower you to dissolve the dread that keeps you stuck, wrangle stubborn anxiety and frustration, and maybe even find hope in connecting with your purpose.
Now that you're well-armed with The Oracles, The Commencements, and The Alchemies, you are fully equipped with the three Cornerstones of neurodivergent-friendly systems... And you're gonna need them...
Join me next week as we go beyond The Cornerstones, peeking ahead to a new series where I'll be breaking down the reasons we need these powerful weapons —The League of Executive Dysfunctions.
✂️ TL;DR
Change the Feeling of a Task: Fight dread and perfectionism with two simple questions. Use The Magic Mirror by asking, "What if this were fun?" to transform drudgery into play. Use The Curse Breaker to fight "The Inspector" by giving yourself permission to do a task badly on purpose.
Change Your Relationship to the Work: Stay grounded and make it easier to return to a task later. Use The Anchor (body doubling) to keep your focus during boring, repetitive chores. Use The Cliffhanger by intentionally stopping mid-task to create a mental "open loop" that pulls you back in later.
Change Your Point of View: When you're overwhelmed, shift your perspective. Use The Anthropologist to observe yourself in the third person, using shame-free curiosity to notice your own behavioral patterns. Use The Satellite to "zoom out" for the big picture, either to reconnect with your "why" or to realize a frustrating task's insignificance.