This is a short reflective post on some issues I’ve noticed in my own struggles with executive dysfunction.

The basic point is a simple one: the worse your executive dysfunction the more you have to work to set up good defaults and ease of access.

The longer version: until recently I had a lot of trouble with keeping our kitchen clean. The problem was that it was far too cluttered. I left literally all of our appliances out at once: the food processor, the toaster, etc. Why? Because they were too hard to put away. Why? Because the cupboards were too crowded and it would take a long time to take things out and put them back. Why? Because I needed to rearrange the containers in them to be properly stacked and ordered.

Now these are all clear steps, aren’t they? Simple chains of “to do this, do that”. The problem is that when context switching and ordering plans in your head is difficult this chain of events becomes hard to recognize and harder to do something about. You can find yourself thinking it through but if you don’t have time in the moment, well, it’s just gone: to be rediscovered the next time you’re struggling with the problem.

On a weekend morning I spent a couple of hours rearranging things, finally, and now there’s a place for everything that requires very little congitive overhead. I don’t have to think about putting the toaster away because it has a place, so it’s become a simple action to unplug it and put it back in its spot.

Since then I’ve been thinking about how often paths of least resistance and default workflows govern our daily behavior. I’ve heard it said that you are the sum of your habits, but what are habits—at least for people like me—but the default workflows of your environment.

This is one of the reasons why, even though I used to love using org-mode as a catch-all for organizing my life—as an aside, if that ideas sounds good I still recommend Organize Your Life in Plain Text! as a comprehensive system—I’ve moved to using bullet journals pretty excusively. There are too many days where the act of hopping on a computer, opening emacs, and going through my org files is actually too hard as a very first task of the day. “Open a notebook, read it” has fewer steps. It’s that simple and is something I can basically always do.

I’ve been trying to figure out what this implies for the rest of my work and life. I work from home frequently and, honestly, I’m working on at least a half-dozen projects at the same time. I get a fair bit done, all things considered, but I’m still constantly frustrated at how much time I’m constantly losing to executive dysfunction & how often I fall short of what I want to be accomplishing. I think if I could find some way to change a lot of the defaults in how I work, study, and write I could feel less overwhelmed all the time.