The Whetstone
How AI Became a Filing Cabinet, Pressure Valve, and Thinking Partner for My ADHD Brain
I have complicated feelings about AI.
The environmental cost of data centers is concerning at best. The way generative AI has been weaponized against artists and writers — people, including me, whose work was taken without consent to train systems that now compete with them — genuinely angers me. The governance conversations we’re not having fast enough scare me. I hold all of that, and I hold it seriously.
I also have ADHD and a very demanding, high-velocity job that is pushing me hard to think about AI’s role in my work.
My brain has been at war with the world it has to operate in for most of my adult life. I was a late diagnosis so it took me a while to understand and really see the quiet, grinding, invisible way that high-functioning ADHD tends to work, where you’ve built an impressive career (on paper at least) and a full life and nobody can see the amount of internal noise it costs you to do it. It shows up in the the hamster wheel in my brain running at full speed behind a perfectly professional exterior. The things I’ve forgotten that embarrass me. The conversations I’ve over-prepared for because my nervous system doesn’t know how to walk in cold. The ideas that arrive fully formed at 11pm where I think I’ve hit a vein of genius and that simply evaporate by morning. The to-do list that lives in seventeen places and somehow none of them. I always thought I was just…a little broken.
I’ve tried the systems. The planners, the apps, the productivity frameworks, the hacks. Some of them helped at the margins. But none of them stuck (my planner graveyard is impressive), and none of them solved the actual problem, which is that my brain generates more than it can organize, feels way more than it can easily regulate, and forgets more than it can afford to.
What I’ve found — unexpectedly and with a fair amount of skepticism still intact — is that AI tools have become something genuinely different for me. I refer to them as a whetstone. Something that takes the raw, messy material I already have and sharpens it into something I can actually use.
The ideas are still mine. Defining the problems and developing the thought process? Still mine. The writing is unequivocally mine; I write better than the robot does, and I actually like writing because I’ve been doing it a very long time. What’s different is that I’ve found something that can hold the behind-the-scenes mess while I figure out what to do with it. Tech doesn’t get tired or impatient or distracted by its own stuff, and I can use it to think out loud at without calculating what I’m costing another person or how much I’m annoying them because I’m info dumping at record speed.
For a brain like mine, that’s pretty load bearing.
Over the next several weeks I’m going to walk through exactly how I use AI tools to work with my ADHD instead of constantly fighting it. Specific use cases and real examples. The embarrassing ones too, because those are usually the most useful.
This isn’t a series about AI being “the future” or the answer or the thing that’s going to fix everything and revolutionize the world while somehow also destroying it. It’s about one neurodivergent person finding an unexpected tool that makes the work of being herself a little less exhausting and a bit of wondering if any of you are in the same boat.
To me, career courage has always been about decoupling worth from work, identity from title, human from job description. So this is me being brave enough to explore territory that makes me a little uncomfortable in service to supporting the neurodivergence in my brain while preserving the things about me professionally that make me, well, me.
If you know or suspect you have ADHD, or you’ve just been using AI like a fancy search engine and wondered if there was more to it, or if you’ve just quietly felt like your brain is running a program nobody else seems to have installed, I’m writing this for you.
Prompts to Try:
Grab your favorite AI companion and offer a couple of early prompts to get the gears going.
“I want to use you as a thinking partner, not a search engine. I’m going to share something I’m working through — an idea, a problem, a decision — and I want you to ask me questions, push back on my thinking, and help me get clearer. Don’t give me answers. Help me find mine.” (Hint: if you’re sensitive to feedback, you can also tell it how to give you pushback in a way you can receive)
“Here’s something I’ve been trying to articulate and can’t quite get there: [paste your messy version, or even vomit it out in voice to text in a big long ramble. Don’t edit.]. Help me figure out what I’m actually trying to say.”
Some things to reflect on
Where in your work or life do you have good raw material that never seems to make it out of your head in a usable form? What’s the bottleneck — the organizing, the articulating, the starting?
When you’ve done your best thinking, what conditions made it possible? What were you doing, who were you talking to, what was different?
What’s the thing you keep meaning to develop — an idea, a project, a position — that keeps getting stuck at the same place? What would it mean to have somewhere to take it that could help you move it forward?
What’s your current relationship with AI tools? Are you skeptical, curious, an occasional user? What would have to be true for you to try using one differently?
Next week, we’ll talk about managing the hundreds of tabs open in my brain and why technology is helping keep my brain noise to a dull roar these days…
The planner graveyard line got me. I've come to think most productivity systems fail for the same reason, which is that they ask the brain that forgets everything to reliably remember to use the system. The whetstone framing sidesteps that, since there's nothing to maintain, you just talk at it. Good piece, and looking forward to the embarrassing examples.