There are two ways to wash a dish
Thich Nhat Hanh gave a friend one instruction before letting him near the sink, and it wasn't about getting the dishes clean.
A visiting friend once offered to do the dishes after dinner at Thich Nhat Hanh's house. Before handing over the sponge, the monk warned him: there are two ways to wash dishes. The first is washing dishes in order to have clean dishes. The second is washing dishes in order to wash dishes — attention on the water, the plate, the motion of your own hands, with the future cup of tea not yet allowed into the room.
This is the argument at the center of The Miracle of Mindfulness: the chore was never the obstacle to peace. The obstacle is being mentally somewhere else while your body does the chore — already at the tea, already at tomorrow, already anywhere but the sink. Rushing the dishes to get to the reward, he points out, guarantees you'll rush the tea too, chasing the next thing after that.
His test for whether meditation is working isn't how still you sit. It's whether you can be as fully present scrubbing a bowl as you claim to be on the cushion.