Lately, I’ve been devoting a lot of thought to the question of how we can best conceptualize executive functions with an eye towards the real world: towards practical concerns like strategies and interventions that can help us to improve our time management skills.

I’ve heard some autistic people arguing that we shouldn’t be trying to force anyone who struggles with executive functions and organization to improve through effort and force of will.  Instead, the argument goes, we should provide accommodations so that people don’t have to rely on their executive functions for organization.  I want to be clear that I actually agree that this is the ideal option in many situations.  Certainly the last thing I want to do is suggest that people should feel guilty for their challenges in this area, or that they should overload themselves and burn out in an effort to compensate through sheer force of will.  To put it mildly, that would be rather counterproductive.

At the same time, there are numerous real-world situations in which organization and time management are absolutely crucial, and I also believe that there are important ways we can try to compensate for difficulties in these areas.  A lot of this compensation comes from practice, and while many of us don’t get a lot of practice in childhood due to what is sometimes called “prompt dependence,” it’s probably better to practice later than never.  And there’s also a very practical reason why we might want to work on executive functioning: relatively few autistic adults are able to get substantial supports or accommodations to help with executive functions and organization, so people do need techniques that they might be able to use to help themselves with executive function.

A large chunk of the academic literature on executive functions is devoted towards exploring different executive function abilities and debating exactly what different types of executive functions exist.  However, this literature can get very abstract, and it can get deep into debates about the cognitive processes underlying executive function.  For example, many articles have been written about the idea that some executive functions might be “hot” and others “cool,” with the main difference between the two categories being the more emotional basis of the “hot” executive functions.  We also spend a huge amount of time discussing specific examples of executive functions, like working memory, set shifting, and so forth.

I certainly don’t claim that this literature is incorrect.  However, there’s no denying that our current focus in the research is very much on the fundamental bases of executive function, and this focus doesn’t necessarily translate well into useful strategies and interventions.  Some executive function interventions have been developed that use computers to train people on very specific tasks (which are thought to be related to some individual executive function, like working memory), and I’m not convinced that these sorts of gains provide too much help to people in the real world.  I think it’s a bit implausible to suggest that we can fundamentally alter a basic cognitive process with a relatively small number of sessions using very specific computerized tasks.  It’s still somewhat unclear whether gains from these tasks are lasting and transferable to the real world.

I think that learning to improve our executive functions requires a more practical set of strategies – and if we do end up changing our core cognitive abilities, it will be through the repeated practice that comes with real-world implementation of these strategies.

Episodic Prospection

One workshop has had a particularly heavy influence on my thinking about real-world executive function.  This workshop was given by Sarah Ward, a speech-language pathologist and well-known presenter.  Ward and her collaborator Kristen Jacobsen developed their own model of practical executive functions, which has “episodic future thinking,” or episodic prospection, at its centre.

Episodic prospection is effectively our ability to envision the future.  While we can perceive three-dimensional reality with height, width, and depth, we cannot rely on perception to visualize the fourth dimension of reality: time.  We cannot see into the future.  Instead, we have to imagine future scenarios.  We have to imagine how we will move through the future, what we will have to do in the future, and what we need to do now to prepare for the future.  We start with a mental image of our goal, of our desired future, and then we figure out the steps we need to take to get there.

This is a very clear and concrete idea, and one that has immediate practical value.  When one works on envisioning the future and planning what needs to be done to ensure that the future unfolds as one desires, one not only gains the long-term benefit of practice but the immediate benefit of having a plan for one’s current situation.  This appears to give training episodic prospection skills in real life a clear advantage over training working memory on a computer.

Estimating Time

Unfortunately, episodic prospection doesn’t help us much if we can’t also develop an accurate sense of timing.  Let’s use a quick example to demonstrate this.  I was recently working on doing some laundry, but I knew I had a meeting coming up.  I successfully used my episodic prospection to imagine myself in the future, and this told me that I would need to get various things ready before leaving, get on my bike, and bike to the meeting location.  (My episodic prospection also told me that I wouldn’t be able to do the laundry when I was away at the meeting, of course.)  However, this information is of limited value on its own.  I also needed to accurately estimate how long it would take to get ready for my meeting and get out the door (about 10 minutes) and how long it would take to bike to the meeting (another 10 minutes).  I also needed to accurately estimate how long it takes to cycle a load of laundry through both the washer and the dryer (about 2 hours).  Because I had less than three hours before the meeting, I knew I could start one load of laundry, but that I should hold off on the second load.

It’s a simple example, but it suffices to show that not understanding how long these tasks take could get us into trouble.  If I forgot that I needed time to pack everything together for the meeting, I’d start packing 10 minutes before the meeting, I’d leave the door when the meeting started, and I’d show up to the meeting 10 minutes late.  If I forgot to allow myself enough time to do the laundry, and therefore started a second load as soon as the first was out of the washer and into the dryer, I’d be leaving for the meeting with that load of laundry only half-done.

Ward seems particularly concerned that we don’t usually show time moving in a visual way, because we see time displayed on digital clocks.  Because we don’t visually see the flow of time on a digital clock, we don’t learn how to estimate the passage of time well.

Furthermore, I think we have an even bigger problem with estimating time.  As I discuss at greater length in another post on a different website (see the “Setting Goals” heading), we’re really bad at predicting how long it will take to do something, whether we accurately understand how time flows or not.  Generally, we tend to underestimate how long it takes to get things done.  We forget time-consuming steps and fail to anticipate complications.

Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem of time.  Usually, the best estimate for how long it is going to take one to do something is going to be based on extrapolation from how long it has taken one to do similar things in the past.

Lists, Schedules, and Calendars

Of course, developing a plan isn’t much use if we forget it immediately afterwards.  We have to preserve visual reminders of all the steps we need to take to achieve our desired futures.  This becomes especially imperative when we have to juggle many different task demands at once.

In the K-12 school system, there’s a huge amount of structure.  Students are told when they are supposed to be doing something.  They’re taught to work with short blocks of time – that they have to use a class block to work on something, or that they have a certain amount of time to get ready for school in the morning.  Some homework assignments might be spread over  days or weeks, but parental nagging will often be available to ensure that students finish these assignments on time.

The adult world can be very different.  Take university, for instance.  Suddenly, we’re masters of our own lives, and we regularly have to work with timelines of weeks or months.  We have assignments and due dates on course syllabi that we have to remember, and we also have to motivate ourselves to even show up for lectures.  We might be living independently, in which case we have to plan the necessities of living.

Of course, there’s no way we can work on one class assignment and still actively maintain our plans for all these other things in our minds.  That would require far more working memory capacity than any working memory training could possibly give us!  We have to write these things down.

As we’re simultaneously working with different levels of organization (e.g., tasks for the next hour, tasks for the day, tasks that need to be worked on gradually over days and weeks), we can use different levels of lists and schedules.  On a different website, I have a post about college organization that touches on some of these topics.  Once we have lists and schedules, we can get the rewarding, natural satisfaction that comes with being able to cross a task off our to-do list.

Initiation, Distraction, and Feeling Overwhelmed

Remember when I was praising episodic prospection at the beginning of this post?  Well, in the course of a fascinating discussion with some other autistic graduate students, I recently realized that there can be a downside to having a good ability to prospect into the future.  Sometimes, we can accurately envision the future, and fully recognize all of the steps we need to reach our desired future – and yet still fail to organize ourselves successfully.

Sometimes, accurate recognition of the many different tasks we need to complete doesn’t help us.  It may even hurt us, because we can accurately foresee that a lot of difficult, boring work lies ahead of us.  However, if we don’t start working on things, we start to fall behind, and the list of tasks to be completed will stay just as long (or grow longer), even as the time available to complete those tasks steadily shrinks.

We do need our prospection to identify what we have to do, but then we need to force ourselves to initiate these tasks.  We have to start working on them, and then we have to avoid being distracted by anything that threatens to grab our attention.  Sometimes, when we fail to initiate tasks or get distracted from them, we’re doing so in the full knowledge that we’ll then struggle to finish everything we have to do on time – and that recognition then increases the chance we’ll feel overwhelmed.  As we get more overwhelmed, we may start working to keep ourselves in a distracted state where we don’t have to think about the consequences of our distraction.  It can be a vicious circle.

I can only say that we need some way to hold ourselves accountable, and that there are a number of tricks we can try to achieve this accountability.  Maybe we can use social pressure from others to help (e.g., parental nagging), although we really should be learning to do these things for ourselves.  Maybe listing all the steps and dividing them up over the time available can make our plan seem less overwhelming (or maybe it will show that the plan is unrealistic and needs to be changed).  Maybe we can use artificial rewards to encourage ourselves to finish the tasks on our to-do lists.  Maybe we can restrict our access to tempting distractions (e.g., the Internet) until we’ve made a given amount of progress towards our goals.

Practice, Practice, and More Practice

And finally, I want to conclude by emphasizing that we need to practice our time management and executive function skills.  Only through practice can we learn effective time management.  I think we need to organically develop a personalized organizational system through practice, changing and adding to it as required.  I also think we need practice in order to improve those core executive function abilities at the heart of time management; improvements in these cognitive abilities will take a long time and may not be as obvious as a new organizational strategy, but I’m convinced that they can occur and that they are vitally important.

I was fortunate enough to be in a distributed education program from Grade 8 to Grade 12.  This was effectively homeschooling, except using the official provincial education curriculum of my home province.  At the beginning of each school year, I got a package of paper or online materials representing my work for the next ten months, and then I had to hold myself to account and finish everything.  (It wasn’t even really “due” in ten months; the deadline was a bit soft, and I knew I could work into the summer if I really wanted to.)  As you might expect, there was a temptation to procrastinate, given the massive time-frames involved, and I certainly did plenty of procrastination.  However, I gradually learned to structure my time better and reduce, if not entirely avoid, the last-minute rush in May and June.

This gave me essential practice for university.  It meant that I was already used to structuring my time over long periods.  For me, it was actually easier to keep ahead of deadlines that might be, at most, a few weeks ahead.  I listened to the typically-developing undergraduates moaning and groaning about how difficult it was to organize their time at university, compared to high school, and I was grateful for all of my practice in the art of time management.

Sadly, I worry that we don’t usually give children with disabilities practice organizing their time.  I fear that we have a tendency to structure the time of children with disabilities even more than we structure the time of typically-developing children.  I am concerned that we might be very prone to intervening to do things for children with disabilities.  While I think it’s great that we want to help people with disabilities, we do need to ensure that all of us – and perhaps especially people with disabilities – have opportunities to improve our time management and executive function abilities through repeated practice.

We also have to make sure that we don’t allow ourselves to lose the motivation and drive we need to succeed.  I feel like many of us have very low expectations of children with disabilities, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the children may then internalize these low expectations.

What are your thoughts?  Do these ideas make practical sense, or do they need revision?  Are there things I’m overlooking?  Do you have good organizational strategies that are relevant here?