Executive Functions: The Skills Behind Getting Things Done

Getting through an ordinary workday requires more from your brain than it appears to.

You decide what deserves your attention and keep relevant information in mind while you work. When something interrupts you, you have to decide whether to respond or stay with what you are doing. Plans change, time passes, people need things from you, and eventually the work still has to reach some kind of completion.

We tend to describe all of this simply as getting things done.

Underneath it are a number of mental processes that help you direct your thinking and behavior toward a goal. These processes are called executive functions.

Executive functions help you turn an intention into action. They are involved throughout the process, from deciding what matters and beginning the work to staying with it, adjusting when necessary, and bringing it to completion.

Understanding them gives you a much more precise way to think about performance than asking whether someone is productive, disciplined, organized, or good at following through.

Think of an orchestra

Executive function is easier to understand when you stop thinking of it as one ability.

Think of an orchestra. The strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion have different jobs, but the music depends on what happens when they work together. A strong performance doesn’t require every section to be doing the same thing. It requires each section to contribute what the music needs at the right time.

Your executive functions work in much the same way.

Consider what happens when you lead a meeting. You have to keep relevant information available while the conversation moves and remain engaged instead of following every competing thought or interruption. As new information emerges, you may need to adjust your thinking without losing track of why everyone is there. All the while, time is passing and you are responding to other people while still thinking clearly enough to move the meeting somewhere useful.

You experience the whole thing as “running a meeting.” Your brain is coordinating several different processes to make that possible.

This is why executive function is better understood as a collection of interacting capacities than as a single skill you either have or do not have.

The twelve executive functions

There is no single universally agreed-upon list of executive functions. In my work, I use twelve domains because together they provide a practical way to understand many of the cognitive demands that show up in work, life, and leadership.

Working Memory helps you keep information available while you are using it.

Response Inhibition helps create enough space between an impulse and your response to make a choice.

Cognitive Flexibility helps you adjust your thinking or approach when circumstances change.

Task Initiation helps you move from intending to do something to beginning it.

Planning and Prioritization helps you decide what matters and put work into a useful order.

Organization helps you arrange information, tasks, and physical materials so you can find and use them when you need them.

Time Management helps you understand how activities occupy time and manage your behavior against the time available.

Emotional Regulation helps you continue to think and choose while emotion is present.

Goal-Directed Persistence helps you continue working toward an outcome over time, including when the early energy or interest has faded.

Metacognition helps you observe and evaluate your own thinking and performance.

Sustained Attention helps you remain engaged with something long enough to do what it requires and redirect your attention when it wanders.

I also include problem solving, although I treat it somewhat differently. Problem solving is an applied capacity that draws on several executive functions at once. When you are solving something complicated, you are rarely using one cognitive process in isolation. You have to keep enough of the problem available to think about it, consider possible approaches, respond to new information, and notice whether what you are doing is actually working.

You don’t need to memorize twelve definitions. The list is useful because it reveals how much cognitive work can be hidden inside something that looks simple from the outside.

“Finish the proposal” sounds like one task.

Your brain may have considerably more work to do.

Executive functions develop

Executive functions develop over time.

A young child can know a rule and still be unable to stop themselves from breaking it in the moment. As children grow, they become better able to manage increasingly complex demands on their attention and behavior. By adolescence, the cognitive work expected of them is considerably more sophisticated, and those capacities are still developing.

Adulthood doesn’t mean development is finished in any practical sense. We continue learning how to manage the demands placed on these capacities, often without thinking of what we are doing as executive-function development at all.

The demands placed on those capacities change too.

Someone who managed their work effectively as an individual contributor may become a manager and suddenly need to track their own responsibilities while coordinating the work, needs, questions, and development of other people. A business owner may use the same memory and organizational habits successfully for years, then discover that those methods stop working as the business grows.

The person may not have become less capable. The cognitive load may have outgrown the way they were accustomed to managing it.

That is an important possibility whenever someone says, “I used to be able to do this.”

Your access can change

Executive function is not a fixed verdict on what you can or cannot do.

These capacities can develop, and people can become more skilled at supporting them. Sometimes that means developing a skill itself. Sometimes it means changing the way work is structured so the brain is carrying less of the burden internally.

Your ability to use a particular executive function can also change depending on the conditions you are working under.

Stress, sleep, physical health, workload, emotional strain, relationships, transitions, environment, and available support can all affect access. Something that feels relatively easy under one set of conditions may require considerably more effort under another.

This is one reason behavior alone gives us an incomplete picture.

If someone repeatedly forgets something important, struggles to begin, has difficulty changing course, or underestimates how long work will take, it is easy to turn the visible behavior into a conclusion about the person. Careless. Procrastinating. Stubborn. Disrespectful. Those interpretations may feel obvious while telling us very little about what actually produced the behavior.

Understanding executive function allows us to become more curious about the process producing the behavior before deciding what the behavior says about the person.

What matters is the pattern

Once you understand executive function, “I need to get better at getting things done” starts to become too broad to be useful.

Getting things done requires different mental processes at different points. Knowing where work becomes difficult gives you much better information about what the work is asking of you.

It also helps explain why broad productivity advice can be frustrating. A new planner may be useful when the problem involves making information visible. It may do very little when you already have a perfectly good plan and cannot reliably begin the work. More detailed planning will not necessarily help when the real difficulty appears after an interruption and you cannot easily reconstruct where you were.

The orchestra matters because no section performs alone. What looks like difficulty in one area may involve several functions interacting with each other, the demands of the task, and the conditions around you.

That is why understanding executive function is less about deciding which skills you are “good” or “bad” at and more about seeing how the whole system works.

Once you can see the individual parts, getting things done stops being one mysterious ability you are supposed to possess.

It becomes something you can actually understand.