Hey Reader,
As someone who works in the Neurodiverse space I hear a lot of talk about "Executive Dysfunction". That disobedient controller that stops us from doing the things you want.
But is the controller real? I'm not sure it is...
Want Tone and Context from my voice vs written text:
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“Executive dysfunction” stems from a model of the brain that assumes we have a “mental” CEO—a “Central Executive System” calling the shots; except even as early as 1996, cognitive scientists called it a “conceptual ragbag”1 —a placeholder term for something we didn’t (and still don’t) fully understand.
This raises a big question: if executive dysfunction is based on a placeholder, is there a better way to understand what the heck is actually going on?
Simple answer: Yes. It’s called Ecological Psychology2
It’s not an internal controller telling you how to act. It’s a signal that there’s a disconnect between the information you’re perceiving and the action you’re trying to take.
Let’s look at some common problems normally attributed to Executive Dysfunction, and see how we could reframe/shift/move it away from a naughty Mental CEO to something that we can DO something about. (with as few mental gymnastics as possible).
Doing the laundry
You’re staring at a pile of laundry, knowing it needs to be done, but it feels impossible! You don’t know where to begin. So it just sits there…
Eventually, you get around to it. But how? Did the conceptual ragbag suddenly decide to give you a moment of respite? Why then and not when you wanted to do it?
Maybe it was sheer willpower—but if that’s true, why does it work sometimes and not others?
Let’s rewind. As you look at that massive pile of laundry, do you even know where to begin?
No.
But when you managed to do it, did you find a way to start?
Yes.
So what changed?
For me, it’s usually groaning and saying: I don’t care how I get this done; I just need to get this basket out of my way so I can [insert something I actually care about].
If I take the dry laundry upstairs, I’ll be able to walk through my kitchen without tripping. Also I won’t have to come downstairs in the freezing cold to find clothes to put on.
I saw possibilities for action3—things I actually cared about doing and I did it.
Let’s look at another example:
“Too Many” Hobbies (that you don’t do anymore).
When I work with clients, they often mention their “hobby bin”—a collection of hobbies (or variations) they were once excited about but quickly abandoned for something new. For business owners, this often extends to tech tools: the ones they eagerly adopt, then drop. It’s easy to blame the conceptual ragbag for stopping you, forgetting about it, or even killing your joy.
My first question is always:
Do you actually want to do this hobby?
The responses usually fall into two camps:
1. Yes: “But I completely forget about it, and then I feel guilty… and XYZ…”
2. No: “Not really, but I spent so much money on it, so I feel like I have to keep doing it.”
Let’s start with Camp #2.
You don’t want to do it anymore—so don’t. Seriously, It’s not required, unlike laundry.
But what about sunk cost?
Here’s a question to help:
What opportunities did you gain from this experience?
At the very least, you’ve learned something you don’t enjoy. That insight matters—it deepens your understanding of how you work, what energises you, and what doesn’t. This knowledge can ripple into other areas of your life or business.4
Now… what about Camp #1
So if you’ve started a hobby, and you love the hobby but you forget it exists. You’ve got a visibility problem. Perception and Action are coupled. You see/hear/experience something you react. As you do something, you see something new.
You see a crochet hook tied to a ball of yarn and you see an opportunity to crochet. Now you can choose to DO that… or you can choose to NOT.
If you see a crochet hook, and you don’t see yarn… the opportunity for action isn’t crochet it’s… find that spool of yarn. This means you’re often jumping between tasks, because you keep seeing5 different affordances (opportunities for action).
Visibility works both ways… you can constrain visibility, so you see less options — or you can give visibility so you can give more.
For example:
If you want to do more crochet.
Put the hook and the yarn together, and put it somewhere you can always see it. So when you’re walking past you see it and go… huh… I wanna do that.
Sometimes it’s strong enough that you’ll go straight to it, other times it won’t.
If something keeps drawing your attention TOO much, move it to a less visible place.
Want to do different hobbies.
Do different hobbies, put them in different places, the ones you wanna do a lot, put them in two separate (but equally visible places).
These strategies—like placing hobbies where you’ll see them—work because they turn the problem into a solvable puzzle, not a broken system you have to force yourself to fix. And that’s MY issue with the term ‘Executive Dysfunction."
The problem with “Executive Dysfunction”
Now I am not for one moment saying that the issues above aren’t real, because they are. These are real behaviours, and real struggles that we experience every day. But when we use ‘Executive Dysfunction’ as the reason, we risk accepting a fixed narrative about ourselves. That there is something wrong with how we work within the world.
And honestly? That just sucks.
What if… the information we need to act is already around us, waiting for us to notice?
What if we treated the struggles as signals instead of failures of a central executive?
It doesn’t dismiss the real issues — it puts them into perspective, and allows us to go… huh… what is actually happening here.
It allows us to get curious about the way we actually work. Instead of assuming that we work “wrong” and trying to fix how we exist in the world.
It allows us to:
- Find reasons to do the damn thing that we don’t wanna do.
- Create our own solutions so we can do (or not do) as many hobbies as we like! 😁
- Feel confident that what we’re actually doing; isn’t the result of some faulty programming, but just part of who we are…
As someone who’s blind in one eye, hard of hearing in the other, autistic (and a little ADHD), and navigating life as a trans person in possibly the most challenging time I could, I’ve learned one thing: there’s always a solution.
It’s not about waiting for a ‘conceptual ragbag’ to magically fix things for us—it’s about seeing what’s possible and making it easier for ourselves (something we often neglect).
