What is Executive Function, and How Can You Improve It?
- Lucy Wallace
- Mar 27
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 3
Meet Lily
Thirteen-year-old Lily is in eighth grade. She loves to sing and can talk your ears off about her favorite K-pop group. Though Lily is a bright and capable student, she’s struggling with the increasing demands of her eighth-grade curriculum–especially writing.
Lily has trouble getting started on assignments. Tasked with writing a book report, she procrastinates for days, her dread and anxiety building continuously. When she finally gets started, she spends several hours trying to choose the “right” topic. She has little energy and time left for the writing itself.
Lily finishes the project at the last minute, and she knows it’s not her best work. This ordeal leaves her exhausted, behind on other homework, and more discouraged than ever.
Executive functioning in the writing process
In my work as a writing tutor, I’ve taught many students like Lily. Lily’s writing struggles aren’t just about writing, per se. Rather, they stem from issues with executive functioning (EF), the planning, organization, and self-regulation skills that help us execute tasks.
EF-related writing challenges may be part of an established diagnosis such as autism or ADHD, or they may not. Either way, these struggles can wreak havoc on writing homework.
Fortunately, there are solutions. By adding scaffolding and structure to writing assignments, we can help students develop EF skills and tackle complex tasks more effectively. In this post, I’ll share six of my favorite strategies to support EF throughout the writing process.
Strategy 1: Set the environment up for success
Lily assumed that her struggles with the book report reflected her being “bad at writing”. Really, though, there were other situational factors at play:
She was tired.
She was hungry.
She’d had an argument with her friend after school, so she was feeling particularly anxious and self-critical.
Her younger siblings were playing loudly in the other room, as younger siblings so often do.
Notifications kept popping up on her phone.
Addressing each of these factors individually, we can create an environment more conducive to writing:
Get enough food, water, and sleep.
Identify most and least focused times of day, and plan to write during the focused times whenever possible.
Remove potential distractors, both physical and electronic.
Be realistic about your attention span. Plan to focus for a maximum of 20-25 minutes at a time, and take frequent breaks.
Use relaxation techniques to lower anxiety before writing.
Strategy 2: Make a checklist.
Writing isn’t a single activity, but rather, a whole collection of tasks: brainstorming, drafting, organizing, rereading, and so on. If we don’t write down each step, they’ll clutter up our working memory, and we’ll likely forget important details.
The answer? Checklists! Checklists are the best thing, and whoever is responsible for Google Docs’ checklist feature deserves a massive pay raise. If I haven’t yet sold you on the life-changing potential of checklists, consider the following:
Checklists facilitate task initiation by helping students determine exactly where to start.
They scaffold time management, allowing students to think through how long each step will take.
We can revisit the checklist as we work to see what we’ve done and where to go next–i.e., practicing self-monitoring.
Checklists help students prioritize, too. With all the tasks laid out in front of us, we can identify the most and least important ones.
There’s something undeniably satisfying about the act of checking stuff off. It makes you feel powerful and accomplished. At least, it does for me.
My standard checklist looks like this:
Retrieve and clarify assignment instructions.
Brainstorm ideas.
Outline/map/organize ideas.
Check to make sure the outline meets the assignment requirements.
Add details to flesh out the outline.
Going section by section, expand the outline into full sentences.
Reread and edit.
Proofread.
Submit!
Strategy 3: Organize everything
Scientifically speaking, the verdict is in on multitasking: it doesn’t work.
You might think you’re doing two things at once, but really, you’re jumping back and forth between the two, and you’re doing each one a little less efficiently.
Psychologists call this cognitive switch cost. I don’t have data to back this, but I think it’s safe to say that this cost is even higher when ADHD and EF issues are in the mix.
I see the cognitive switch cost in real time when writing materials are scattered across tabs and documents. Each time we jump to another window, we have to reorient ourselves and remember what we’re doing.
Here’s how to minimize the switch cost and stay organized:
Put everything in one document.
Play with font size to make headings and key ideas stand out.
Bold, italicize, or underline important words.
Set aside materials you’re not actively using.
Color-code everything.
Note: Many ADHD students (and some neurotypicals!) find it easier to concentrate when they have stimulation: music playing, TV, a fidget toy, etcetera. I wouldn’t consider this a source of switch cost as long as it remains in the background. If, however, that source of input becomes a task of its own, it could pull attention away from the main activity and incur a switch cost.
Importantly, switching itself isn’t necessarily a problem. Some people find it energizing and engaging to bounce from thing to thing, and if that strategy works, great! We just want to watch for unintentional switching that drains our energy without providing any benefit.
Strategy 4: Highlight the current task.
Working memory describes the information that we actively maintain and use. Have you ever read a phone number aloud and repeated it to yourself as you dial? That’s working memory. Or have you walked down a grocery aisle trying to remember that you need eggs, milk, and cream cheese? That’s working memory, too.
I know a student has working memory limitations when they frequently ask, “Wait, what did you say?” It’s also worth mentioning that plenty of non-autistic/ADHD people struggle with this, too. Our working memory can be affected by stress, overwhelm, fatigue, and so on.
The more information we cram into working memory, the more likely we are to forget it. Correspondingly, if we remove that information from our working memory and store it elsewhere, we free up space for thinking and writing. Here are a few ways to do this:
Write the current task down on a physical or digital surface, ideally in large, colorful letters.
Use a sticky note or arrow to point out the thing you need to focus on.
Cover up irrelevant materials physically (with paper) or digitally (turning the font white).
Strategy 5: Set a timer.
I’m writing these words on a Thursday. I promised to have this post finished by Friday. This was a deliberate move on my part. If I’d planned to finish this post “at some point,” it may never have happened. My self-imposed deadline forces me to buckle down and actually do the thing.
This strategy works on a smaller timescale, too, which is why I like to set timers for each step of the writing process. As an added bonus, timers help combat ADHD-related time blindness, and–unsurprisingly–they support time management skills.
Strategy 6: Stop and reflect.
I always ask my students three questions throughout tutoring sessions:
What’s the goal?
What have we already done?
What should we do next?
In the short term, these prompts help students organize their work, and in the long term, they encourage metacognitive awareness. Students begin to develop a sense of which challenges come up as they write and which strategies will help. They also start to generalize their skills, taking an approach that worked in one context and applying it to another.
Lily revisits her book report with the above strategies in mind.
Set up the environment. Lily finds it easiest to focus in the morning. She sits down at the kitchen table and removes distractions by leaving her phone in the other room. She’ll also take a break every 15 minutes. Her siblings have agreed to cause trouble in a quieter, less immediately disruptive fashion.
Make a checklist. Lily lists out the steps of the assignment.
Review instructions
Choose a book
Brainstorm ideas about the book
Choose main points to focus on
Make an outline
Write!
Get organized. Next, Lily gathers her materials.
She realizes that she wrote down some ideas during a class discussion, which is great–she’s already done some of the work!
She puts everything in one folder and uses her very fancy pastel highlighters to mark up her book.
Highlight the current task. Lily goes through each step on the list, writing her current task on a big post-it to support working memory.
Set a time. Lily’s timer helps her work at an efficient pace, and it makes a nice chime sound when it goes off, rather than the usual annoying beep.
Stop and reflect. Her mom prompts her with self-reflection questions throughout, and when Lily is finished, they take a few minutes to talk about how the assignment went. Although Lily struggled at certain points, she also had lots of successes. Recognizing those successes boosts her confidence, and the next time she comes home with a writing assignment, she feels ready to tackle it on her own.
About Lucy: I graduated from Stanford in 2024 with a degree in psychology and Slavic Studies. I currently live in Boston and work as a writing tutor with a focus on supporting 2e/neurodivergent students. I've been involved in the neurodiversity world since I was diagnosed with autism at age 18. I hope to pursue a PhD in psychology and develop evidence-based interventions to help neurodivergent students write. For tutoring inquiries, please check out my website!
