Cookie Crumb Motivations

Working around a visual brain

The other day I picked up a dirty dishtowel and the chicken scraps that needed to go out. Two minutes later I was standing in the utility room with the towel in one hand, remembering that I still had laundry in the washer and dryer. I set the towel down, grabbed the scraps, headed for the chicken coop… and walked right past the pole pruners. Which reminded me the front porch vines needed trimming.

You know how it goes. Scraps to the girls, pruners in hand, baby pecan trees everywhere (so many), vines tamed, a lap around the backyard with the hand pruners, a chat with Koozie the neighbor dog while throwing him sticks he crunched up like they owed him money. By the time I circled back a couple of hours later, the laundry was rotated, the dishtowel was in the washer with the lid up like a little flag saying “next load ready,” the pruners were put away, and I stood in the kitchen with a cold glass of electrolytes feeling quietly triumphant.

This is how most of my productive days happen. Not because I sat down with a perfect planner and checked off boxes in order. But because my brain runs on context and cues. The world itself is my to-do list. I have a visual brain in an invisible working field.

I raised four children while helping my dad on a small farm, a life full of constant distractions and cues to do something, usually several somethings all urgent at that moment. I’m now caregiver for my husband, gardener for my sanity, artist who keeps getting distracted by the light on a new leaf or the perfect angle for a sketch, and I’m trying to write for a living. The writing part is the trickiest. It doesn’t come with built-in environmental triggers the way an overflowing laundry basket or a flock of judgmental hens does.

For most of my life I thought this meant something was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just sit down and make a clean, linear plan like “normal” people? Why did my inbox have twenty-thousand emails I couldn’t bear to mass-delete because they’re a record of life, even while I lose important things in the avalanche? Why do I organize the house with everything visible—open shelves, utensils hanging on the wall, nothing hidden in dark drawers—because if I put it away, it might as well not exist?

Turns out, my brain isn’t broken. It’s just wired for visible, contextual, embodied work.

I have been calling it the “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” style of productivity. Every action creates the next cue. It’s the same mechanism that let me keep a household running with kids and farm chores and now caregiving. It’s why I can turn one trip outside into pruning, weeding, dog enrichment (not even my dog, but he’s a lonely boy), and a full chore loop that actually gets finished. The yard doesn’t hide tasks from me. The tools are right there. The vines are shouting (literally, since the cardinals are nesting in them).

The hard part is the invisible stuff: long-term projects, emails, writing a blog post or the next book chapter. Those don’t wave at me from the counter. They require tricks to bring them into my visible world.

One trick that reliably works? Body doubling with videos. I put on someone calmly cleaning their house or working in the yard and suddenly my nervous system says, “Oh, we’re working now.” It’s not cheating. It’s giving my brain the social/contextual cue it evolved to respond to. I’ve used it for years with house projects; now I’m starting to use it for writing sessions too.

I am learning stop fighting the wiring and start designing around it:

Leave the notebook or document open on the counter or computer desktop as a visual flag like the washer lid.

Keep a visible “next tasks” whiteboard with 3–5 things max. More than this and my brain freaks out about what’s important and I wind up hiding in procrastination.

Turn long-term work into cookie crumbs: “Open the tax folder and leave it out until it’s handled.” The open folder becomes the cue, just like the pole pruners I walked past in the garage. This only works if you don’t have too many open folders that it is overwhelming. Visual clutter turns into a solid wall of unperceived details.

Let the garden and art feed the writing instead of competing with it. A thought about weeding becomes an essay on my writing. Time away from screens allows my brain to chew on the next plot point.

I’m learning this isn’t a flaw to fix. It’s the same strength that carried me through raising kids on a farm, through caregiving days that don’t follow any neat schedule, and through keeping a creative life alive in the middle of it all. Brains like ours are excellent at responsive, multi-threaded, real-world complexity. We notice the baby trees. We integrate the dog into the pruning round. We turn kitchen waste into garden fertility and a story idea at the same time.

If your brain works this way too—if your house is full of open shelves and visible projects, if you lose things the moment they go in a drawer, if your best work happens in flow once something visible gets you moving then please hear this:

You are not scattered. You are not failing at being “organized.” You are optimized for a different kind of environment than the modern world usually offers. The solution isn’t to become someone else. It’s to build a life full of the right cookies.

Leave the notebook out. Put the video on. Trust that once you pick up the dish towel (or the pen, or the sketchbook), the next cue will appear. Some days the loop will be small. Some days you’ll prune the whole metaphorical (and literal) yard and end up with clean laundry, happy chickens, a tired dog, and three new pages written.

That’s enough. It has to be enough.

We’re the ones who keep the systems running, even if not always in straight lines, but in living, breathing loops that connect kitchen to garden to family to art to words on the page. The world needs that kind of tending.

So if you’re like me, go pick up the dish towel. Or open the document. Or step outside and notice what’s calling your name today.

The rest of the day will unfold from there.