For Cate
Same pattern. Different infrastructure.
You wrote this about your collaborative writer:
“For me, a collaborative writer was an accessibility accommodation that I needed to succeed.”
And this about the process of writing the book itself:
“How do you write a book about struggling to focus when you cannot focus? How do you write a book about executive functioning when the very act of sitting down to write often felt like an abject impossibility?”
I build the answer to that question. Not for other people. For myself first. And I think your audience needs what I found.
The recognition
Blacksmith, magician, Shakespeare MFA, Renaissance Festival entertainment director, slam poet, costume designer, competitive broadsword fighter, casino marketing manager, sex educator, content creator, author. That’s your actual resume.
Here’s mine. Art school (SVA, graphic design). Self-contained special education teacher (twelve IEPs, every subject, every accommodation). Self-taught software engineer. Enterprise platform architect, twelve years on one system. AI methodology researcher. Kitchen systems designer for a household where nobody can eat the same food. Writer. Music producer. Hydroponic gardener.
Neither of us can pick a lane. Every one of those produced real work. And for most of my life they looked like a scattered mess.
You found your answer: you surrounded yourself with accommodations. Rennie to write with. Jenn to organize the chaos. A publisher who let everything about the book be non-traditional because you are non-traditional. You wrote about the moment it clicked: “the help I’d spent a lifetime refusing wasn’t a concession to my limitations. It was, in fact, the kindest thing I could have done for myself.”
I found a different version of the same answer. I built the accommodations into tools, and I systematized them so they work without another person in the room.
What I built
I go down the rabbit holes. I always have. The gold is real. I just used to lose it on the way back.
So I built tools that document the trip and bring back the value. Three of them, all free, all published, all open.
SavePoint marks where a thought crystallized. When the hyperfocus ends and I context-switch (and I always context-switch), the insight doesn’t disappear. It’s marked. Timestamped. I can find it three weeks later when it connects to something else. Your audience could start using this today, in any AI conversation, in ten minutes.
FormWork coordinates the whole process. It starts with getting the thinking out with as little friction as possible. Voice memos, dictation, talking it through. No structure required at the point of capture. The accommodation is aimed at the human first. Then the tools structure it, organize it, connect it to what came before.
The voice governance system makes sure that when AI touches my writing, it still sounds like me. Like the person who had the ideas, with the specific way I build a thought.
Together these are a content compilation engine. For someone who produces enormous volume across scattered domains and loses most of it, this is the infrastructure that keeps the gold from the prospecting trips.
You used a collaborative writer as an accommodation. Jenn organizes your chaos. My tools do the same work, but they’re systematized and teachable. Anyone with access to AI (which is everyone) can use them.
The question you already asked
You wrote: “How do you write a book about struggling to focus when you cannot focus?”
I can answer that. This site, this series, these published systems: they’re the first time in my life I’ve been able to assemble my own thinking into something coherent and public. Forty-three essays. Seven whitepapers. Four book series in progress. All compiled from ten years of scattered insights, half-finished ideas, rabbit holes that went deep but never got documented.
The tools made it possible. I talk through what I’m thinking. The tools capture it, structure it, preserve my voice, and connect it to what came before. I don’t have to hold it all in my head. I don’t have to sit down and focus on writing when the executive function isn’t there. I pour when I can, and the tools compile when I’m ready.
That’s the answer to your question. And I think it’s an answer your audience is looking for.
What I can bring your audience
You said on Hacking Your ADHD: “I don’t care how you do your laundry. What I care about is giving you the tools and the introspection.”
I have tools. Concrete, usable, free.
Your community is full of people who went deep on something last month and can’t find the thread. People who you described: “I have never had ‘habits’, I have a daily constant onslaught of information about what I am doing vs what I should be doing.” People whose best thinking happens in bursts that don’t connect to each other.
Nobody is teaching them how to use AI as a cognitive prosthetic. The actual methodology: how to structure the input so the output is useful, how to preserve context between sessions, how to keep your voice when the machine wants to flatten it.
I built a free series that teaches exactly this. Four tools, each one a text file you paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Thirty seconds to set up. No code. No account. Your audience could be using them today.
Here’s some of the longer writing behind the tools:
Talk to It, Don’t Type at It Why verbal input produces better AI output. The brain dump as method.
The story under the story
I spent ten years raising two neurodivergent kids while being neurodivergent myself and not knowing it. Both my kids have ADHD and ASD. I don’t have an official diagnosis. But both of their therapists have asked, and when I look at the systems I had to build just to get through a week, the answer seems obvious to everyone except the person who never got tested. Two apples, no tree.
You were diagnosed the day before your 30th birthday. I still haven’t been. But the tools I built aren’t theoretical. They’re what I needed to survive. And this body of published work is the bloom on a ten-year self-accommodation process. The first time I’ve been able to get it out of my head and into the world.
Your interoception series resonated with me. You wrote: “I didn’t have the receptors for it. I had to build them.” That’s what I did with cognition. I didn’t have the executive function to hold it all. So I built external systems that hold it for me.
What I’m asking
A conversation. I think there’s real overlap between what you talk about and what I’ve built that neither of us has explored yet.
You surround yourself with accommodations to do your best work. I systematized that same instinct into tools anyone can use. The free series is ready for your audience today. And I think there’s a deeper conversation here about what AI tools can do for people whose brains work the way ours do. I’d love to have it.
Peter Salvato petersalvato.com ptsalvato@gmail.com