Executive dysfunction explained

Executive function is the umbrella term for the brain’s higher-order control abilities: the part of you that holds a goal in mind, decides what to do next, switches between tasks, resists the easier option, and keeps track of where you are in a plan. The neuroscientist Adele Diamond’s widely cited 2013 review groups the core abilities into three:

• inhibition — overriding an impulse or a habitual response
• working memory — holding information live in mind while you use it
• cognitive flexibility — shifting perspective or strategy when conditions change

On top of those sit higher-order skills like planning, reasoning and problem-solving.

The psychologist Russell Barkley has argued for a broader picture in the context of ADHD: executive function isn’t only cognitive, it’s also self-regulation across time, emotion and motivation. In his framing, the manager doesn’t just hold the plan; it generates the future-self that the plan is for. That extension matters because it explains why executive-function differences so often show up alongside emotional dysregulation, time blindness and difficulty with delayed reward. They are not coincidences; they are the same system. Wikipedia’s overview of executive functions is a reasonable plain-language entry point if you want to read further.

Three patterns recur:

• Start-stuck — you know exactly what needs doing, you want to do it, and the part of you that initiates simply will not engage. This is the territory covered in our post on autistic inertia and ADHD paralysis.
• Mid-stuck — you set off well, then lose the thread halfway. Working memory drops the plan and you find yourself in a different tab, a different room, a different task entirely, with no memory of the handover.
• Switch-stuck — you cannot leave the thing you are currently inside, even when you know you should, and the planned transition slips by unnoticed.

These look like very different problems from the outside — the person who can’t start, the person who can’t focus, the person who can’t stop. Inside, they are the same machine misfiring at different points. Naming that helps, because it reframes the question from “why am I like this in this one specific way” to “the manager is offline today, what scaffolding do I need?” And it disarms the moral framing. None of these are willpower problems and none of them are about how much you want the outcome.

Standard productivity advice quietly assumes the manager is online. Make a list. Set priorities. Plan your day. Use a calendar. Break the task down. Each of those is a reasonable suggestion that itself requires executive function to execute: remembering the list exists, looking at it at the right moment, choosing between competing items, estimating how long the next thing will take. Recommending executive-function tools to someone with executive-function differences is a little like recommending a ladder to someone whose problem is that they cannot reach the ladder.

This is why so much of the advice feels both correct and useless at once. It is correct: a list does help, in the abstract. It is useless: making it, finding it, and looking at it at the right moment are the exact steps that fall over. The reframe that changes things is to stop trying to make a better manager and start designing for the one you actually have. Build an external system that holds what your working memory cannot, cues you at the right moment because you cannot cue yourself, and lowers the cost of the next move because raising the effort is not on the table.

The principle is simple: anything your manager cannot hold, put outside the manager. A list on the wall, not in your head. A calendar with active reminders that interrupt you, not a static one you have to remember to check. Recurring tasks set up once, not re-decided every week. Visual schedules where they matter: a whiteboard by the door, a sticky note on the laptop, a blister pack you cannot miss. The standard for “good enough” is whether the system runs without needing you to remember it. If it does, it is working. If you keep having to add a layer of remembering, it is not yet outside the manager; it is still inside.

The version of this that takes the most getting used to is body doubling: doing a task in the presence of another person, in the room or over video, who is quietly getting on with their own thing. The external presence supplies the cue your own system isn’t producing. People often hesitate to use body doubling because it feels like it shouldn’t work — you aren’t being helped in any concrete way. That is precisely the point. The other person isn’t there to help with the task; they’re there to be the manager you can’t currently be. None of this is cheating. It is building a scaffold that matches the brain you have.

A few patterns are reliably worth the trouble:

• Implementation intentions — concrete “when X happens, I will do Y” plans, with a strong track record across decades of research; the Wikipedia summary of the work is a good starting point. The trick is specificity: “I will exercise more” is a wish; “when I finish breakfast, I will put my trainers on” is an instruction the half-asleep version of you can actually follow. The plan lives in the environment, not in your motivation.
• Make the entry tiny. A one- or two-minute commitment is small enough to slip under the threshold initiation cannot clear, and momentum often arrives once you are moving, but the minute has to be allowed to be the whole thing, or it becomes a trick you stop believing.
• Batch by energy, not category. Most productivity advice groups tasks by type (emails together, calls together), but the more useful axis for a neurodivergent brain is often cognitive cost: low-demand admin in low-energy windows, deep work where you have anything to spend.
• Move first. A short walk, a glass of water, stepping outside. A change in body state can sometimes shift a mental one when thinking your way out has failed. The body is part of the manager.

I should be straight about why I am writing this particular post. I spent two decades as a project manager in IT — by most measures a good one. I could hold a multi-stream programme in my head, sequence dependencies, see the slip three months out, surface the awkward conversation early. The discipline came naturally enough that people paid me well to do it.

And the entire time, I could not project-manage my own life. The expenses unfiled. The MOT missed. The form lost on the kitchen table for six weeks despite a phone full of reminders. The shower that didn’t happen on a bad day. My clients’ deadlines tracked across three systems and rarely missed; my children’s hospital appointments tracked too, but only by working twice as hard at the tracking, with time blindness chipping at the edges of the day even when the calendar is right. The gap between the two was so wide that for a long time it felt like there must be a moral explanation: that I am lazy, that I am selfish, that I don’t care about my own life as much as I care about everyone else’s. None of which is true. What is true is that the external scaffolding around an IT project (the team, the calendar, the stand-ups, the dashboards, the deadline other people are watching) is doing the executive-function work my own brain cannot reliably do unaided. Take the scaffolding away and the manager goes offline. It is the same machine described in the accordions above, just close enough to home that I refused to see it for a long time.

That gap is one of the reasons I founded Tessolari. I wanted a place where people could find the human scaffolding the rest of life doesn’t supply by default: someone to do the form alongside you, someone to keep the appointment with you, someone whose presence is the cue your own system isn’t producing. If any of this lands, you are not alone in being competent at work and stuck at home. The competence and the stuckness are not in conflict; they are produced by the same brain, in different rooms.

If executive-function differences are making work, study or daily life unmanageable (not “annoying” but “I cannot keep the basics running”), it is worth involving other people. A GP is the starting point in the UK; ideally one willing to discuss neurodivergence rather than reach straight for an antidepressant. Formal ADHD or autism assessment can be accessed via the NHS or through the “right to choose” route to an independent provider. ADHD UK’s diagnosis-pathways guide is a current plain-English walk-through covering both routes, what to do if a GP declines a referral, and how this varies by region. A diagnosis is not the point in itself, but it can unlock things that matter: workplace adjustments, medication if appropriate, and an explanation that sticks.

At work, Access to Work is the UK government grant that funds practical support which goes beyond your employer’s legal duty to make reasonable adjustments. What it can pay for includes:

• coaching
• assistive software
• equipment
• a support worker
• help with travel

You do not need a formal diagnosis to apply; you do need to be in paid work or starting within twelve weeks. Occupational health is another route to adjustments. The thing worth saying out loud: needing scaffolding is not a sign you are failing at being an adult. It is a sign you are designing for the brain you actually have rather than the one a productivity book assumes.