One of the biggest struggles I have with a brain that doesn’t always function executively is prioritizing.
In the past — I’m talking about years ago — prioritizing was a real struggle, and it got in the way of me doing things. Not just getting things done, but even starting them. This made my brain develop the habit of dreaming more than doing. Either everything was important, nothing was important, or something new became important every time.
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As time went by, I learned different ways to tame prioritization, and they have proven useful on more than one occasion.
Today I’d like to answer two questions: why does prioritization get impacted by executive dysfunction? And what tools exist to tackle prioritization when executive dysfunction gets in the way?
I think this will be a good reminder — for me — of what to do when I need to prioritize, and it will also be good support for you if you are in a similar situation.
Why does prioritization get impacted by executive dysfunction?
I don’t know if I’m neurodivergent. I have honestly never checked for that myself. What I do know, though, is that my brain shows signs of executive dysfunction — something I think overlaps with the experiences of people in the neurodivergent community. I like to believe that we all experience executive dysfunction at certain times, with some of us feeling its effects more strongly than others.
In my case, I think that when these dysfunctions show up, they show up. One of the areas they affect is my ability to prioritize effectively — sometimes, although much less often than in the past.
I think I have talked about this before, but when we struggle with things like this, we tend to be very hard on ourselves: You don’t know how to prioritize. You don’t know what’s important. You are unreliable. And so on. That tends to mess with our self-perception and identity.
So why do people with struggles like mine — maybe you, or someone you know — get impacted in this area?
Well, it turns out that prioritization itself is an executive function. The brain doesn’t just know which things are more important than others. It has to construct that priority.
So while the brain is normally good at deciding what’s important and acting on it, executive dysfunction can make it harder to act on the tasks we deem important. The brain may still be capable of determining which task is more important, but the environment ends up deciding what gets our attention — and what doesn’t.
One of the things I learned is that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — our old friend — plays an important role in keeping our goals online and helping our behavior follow them. Working memory supports that process. But one effect of executive dysfunction can be that working memory doesn’t always work as expected.
There are studies showing that working memory — which helps you retain relevant information in real time — plays a role in prioritization. Executive control allocates more of its limited resources toward high-priority information. If you can’t keep the goal active in real time, then it’s hard to follow through with it. This can also be negatively affected when other elements, like inhibition, attentional control, or task switching, are weaker.
As a consequence, we know the priority, but we don’t reliably act on it.
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What can we do about it?
So, now we know what happens.
Under executive dysfunction, our working memory doesn’t always allocate the resources it should to keep what matters in mind when we take action.
It sounds terrible, but it really isn’t. It just is what it is.
One question I ask myself sometimes is, “Why does my brain sometimes do weird shit?” The real question, though, is what should I do to support my brain when it does weird shit?
The idea of returning means accepting drift as the default. We will tend to get pulled away from what matters in terms of our behavior. It’s inevitable. We are human.
Having our brains pull us away from coherence is just one channel through which drift manifests, so our focus shouldn’t be on rejecting this premise, but on embracing it and working around it.
Working as a software engineer, I know that there will always be conditions that show up in the systems we build. Some of them are permanent, and some are transient.
For instance, if your system depends on another service, and for some reason that service is temporarily down, that’s a transient error. When your system receives input it’s not supposed to receive, it can lead to a permanent error.
Regardless, we need to establish what follows when either happens. We need to decide what state the system should be in this case, what tools will be called or used to unblock the system, and what rules should be followed to recover the system if it gets stuck.
The same happens with our brains.
Sometimes our working memory won’t work as we expect, or our executive control won’t operate as it usually does. So instead of rejecting this premise, we build around it.
We build a system — one that helps us lift that weight when we can’t carry it.
In the case of prioritization, the best way is to build a system that remembers for you.
You can achieve this in three ways: adapting your environment, using or building tools, and setting operating rules.
By adapting your environment, you set it up to hold the priority for you and keep you accountable to it. For instance:
Externalize the priority. Paste a Post-it note somewhere visible to help you remember what is important now.
Reduce the number of choices about what to do next. Instead of choosing every time, make a choice and make it explicit. Reassessing priorities every time consumes executive capacity, diminishing executive control.
Reduce your distractions so they don’t hijack your working memory.
You can also build and use tools, which help you lift some of the weight by automating a task or serving as a supporting extension to help you reach your goal. For instance, timeboxing gives your priorities an external boundary. This lifts the weight of wondering, “Am I spending too long on this task?” It also helps you avoid spending too much time on a task that might not be a priority while you are in it.
Finally, when we set operating rules, we lift the decisional weight that sometimes blocks us from prioritizing — or reprioritizing — and moving between priorities accordingly. For instance, you can pre-decide what happens when something interrupts you: “If an email comes in while I’m writing, I’ll finish the block before checking it.” This helps you replace a decision you’d otherwise make in the moment with a rule you made earlier.
I have implemented many of these resources without knowing it, and I can tell they work. But it takes time, a lot of patience, and a lot of compassion. It won’t be easy, and it takes some failure and experimentation to learn and grow.
In our next paid companion, we will explore some practices that can help us prioritize when our executive functions are running low.
In the meantime, think about these resources and try to implement a rudimentary system that can help you prioritize accordingly. Feel free to ask questions in our comments or via DM. I’d be more than happy to help.
I hope you have a wonderful week!
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