The Attentive Archive

Cornerstones, Part 1: The Oracles

This edition of Focus Forge is part of the Cornerstones series, where I'm sharing unique productivity strategies that help me fight executive dysfunction. You can read the introductory post by tapping here.

Short on time? Tap here to jump down to the TL;DR

An assortment of black, white, and metal dice strewn across a map
Photo by Nika Benedictova on Unsplash

Let me briefly introduce two Everyday Horrors: Task Paralysis and Decision Fatigue. Cardinal figures in the League of Executive Dysfunctions.

Task Paralysis is that smart kid who plays devil's advocate just to be a jerk, thinking it's endlessly entertaining to make you second guess every possible decision before you start, then make you feel stupid for listening to them before messing with you all over again. This treatment typically leads to overwhelm that leaves us feeling frozen and, if left unchecked in important areas like work, school, or with regard to your health and self-care, can have dire consequences.

Decision Fatigue is the goon with the stupid laugh that hangs around with many of the other Everyday Horror crew members: seems kind of dumb and harmless at first, but can certainly do its own damage. Especially on low days, when I have to be deliberate about how I want to spend my limited energy, or after busy days, when I've made lots of little choices in quick succession. The mere thought of making even one more decision becomes so exhausting that sometimes, I just... Don't.

When these not-quite-identical twins show up together, as they often do, it can only mean bad news. They feed off of one another, make a big mess, and leave me to clean it up.

Let's look at some common ways they show up:

To help banish these Everyday Horrors, we're kicking off the Cornerstones with my personal favorites, The Oracles. These Core Four strategies are the ones I use most often because they're easily accessible no matter where I am, making it that much easier to add a pinch of fun (dopamine!) to a daunting day —and most of them are quick, exactly what I need to get out of a funk and back into action.

Let's get to it and add these valuable tools to your kit!

The Oracles

To make the decision for you, put you in touch with your intuition, maybe even offer a glimpse into the future.

Useful when: It doesn't matter where you start or what you choose.

Try it with: The Speed Run, The Scoreboard

Oracles also play well with one another! Use The Coin to choose which room to clean today and the others to decide how.

The Coin

The quintessential oracle. Assign the sides and let 'er rip!

It felt like it would be fun to follow that up with "the coin's decision is law!" which, in fairness, is the standard way to play. But, honestly, I don't play that way in real life. If the decision makes me sad that it wasn't The Other Thing, I just do The Other Thing. (This flexibility serves me well on days when I'm feeling particularly spiteful.)

Oh, and when I can't decide which thing to put on each side I just do it alphabetically: A is Heads, B is Tails. Another fun option would be to use an online tool like the one you can see by tapping here, which allows you to skip "heads" or "tails" all together and put the choices directly on each side.

The Dice

Perfect for when there are more options on your list than sides on a coin. It works in just the same way. Give it a roll and see how you feel about the outcome. Tap here for another fun example.

Being able to assign more choices is just the beginning with dice though, there are also dice with more or less sides than the standard six, and you can roll more than one at a time —making for a tool whose uses are only limited by the imagination.

In addition to the obvious D&D applications, and the executive function gamification we're talking about here, I have seen dice used to:

The Wheel

I was originally introduced to the wheel as a motivation tool for gamifying chores for children. Allowing them to spin a wheel between each task gives them a feeling of agency —and also is objectively more fun than slogging through a list of tasks. This easily maps onto similar boring activities for adults! Throw all of your to-dos onto a wheel and spin.

On the surface their uses are similar to using coins or dice, but digital wheels like the example I created and linked below have the added option to hide items that are "done" or that you otherwise don't want to appear in the next spin.

The site I used also includes directions for saving your wheel on a variety of devices. Great for groups of items that need to be revisited often enough for it to be annoying to add the inputs every time, and the bonus of not having to remember where you saved the link.

ADHD Roulette | Tap here and spin for tiny acts of self-care

The Cards

The final, and potentially most versatile, Oracle. For some reason I've always found the act and sounds of shuffling cards to be soothing. As a youth I purchased a slightly longer deck of cards meant for bridge-style shuffling just so I could teach myself how to do it, and I did! To this day I usually carry a deck of some kind in my bag, just in case.

When things seem more complicated than the other three Oracles can handle, like for more nuanced tasks, when I need more than a single random choice at a time, or when I just feel like shuffling the deck, I turn to The Cards. There are a few ways to go about this, and the one you choose will depend on your capacity in the moment, as it often does for me. I'll break down my three favorites below.

Use Any Standard 52 Card Deck

Step 1: Assign a Category to Each Suit. In my mind they go like this:

Optional Step 2: Use the Card's Value

Use a Tarot Deck

If, like me, you love the imagery of tarot decks but you don't always relate to their traditional meanings, this strategy could be just the thing you need to make these gorgeous works of art part of your daily lifestyle.

This down-to-earth method leverages the introspective elements of tarot to provide tangible results by turning task-management into a game of discovery.

Start by assigning practical, action-oriented meanings to the suits, then treat the Major Arcana as wild cards.

The Minor Arcana: Four Task Types

The Major Arcana: Special Instructions

Pulling one of these cards overrides the simple task categories and gives a special, themed prompt. You don't need to know what they all mean, you can make them up as you go and they can be different for each deck, but here are some examples to get you started.

Create Your Own Deck

Grab some index cards and write one task on each card. Make it as vague or specific as you want, but be sure to use language that makes sense for you. If that means you have one card that says "Rotate the Stupid 🤬 Laundry" and another that says "Treat Yo Self to Ice Keem", or "Laundry" vs. "Gather all the towels and put them in the hamper", so be it. The great thing is that you can mix and match. You could even write "Laundry" on one side, then break the task down further on the other so you have a blueprint for when "Laundry" feels too big all by itself. Once you've got your cards together, shuffle them up.

Remember not to overload individual cards! If you have to write "and" consider breaking that task into two separate cards.

How to Play

The Single Card Pull: Shuffle your deck and pull a card. Boom. No decision needed. Do the thing, you got this.

The Priority Spread: Shuffle the deck and pull three cards, lay them out in front of you. Their positions are as follows: The first card is the Must-Do, the second is Choose-To-Do, and the third is Could-Do (If I'm feeling energetic).

Of course there are a ton more ways you can use your cards, these systems are flexible on purpose so they can adapt as our needs change.

Whether it's the flip of a coin or a full spread of cards, the magic of The Oracles is in their ability to gently nudge us out of task-paralysis. They also allow us to be proactive in monitoring our energy usage so that, by outsourcing some decisions, we save our precious executive function for doing the actual tasks.

Next week, we'll explore the second Cornerstone: The Commencements, a collection of rituals for when you're trying to build a routine, and when you just need to get moving.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about executive function, the ADHD brain, and why flexible/novel strategies like gamification tend to be more effective than pushing through and burning out, here's some recommended reading:

✂️ TL;DR

Do you use Oracles that aren't included here? I'm always looking for new things to try and I would love to hear about them or how you use any productivity strategies that lean into the way your brain works, instead of against it.

#Cornerstones #Decision Fatigue #Executive Dysfunction #Focus Forge #Productivity #Resources #Task Paralysis