Welcome to our Executive Functioning Series, where we are taking a closer look and the wide variety of roles executive functioning can play in our lives and some approaches we might take to developing executive functioning skills across contexts, settings, needs, and preferences. 

Executive functioning describes the entire process of how we organize and complete our day to day tasks to meet our needs and goals, and this can understandably mean very different things in different situations. 

In Part 1 we are starting with executive functioning in the home, which can incorporate everything from how we keep ourselves clean and healthy to meeting extracurricular goals. So let’s take a look at some examples of the ways we employ executive functioning and how they play into our daily lives at home. 

If you are interested in learning more about our executive functioning skill categories you can check them all out for free on this poster !

Why is it sometimes so hard to keep up with personal hygiene, even though the tasks associated aren’t the most complicated? 

It’s one thing to know how to brush your teeth and another to make sure it happens twice a day on a reasonable schedule, especially when it’s just one part of a longer routine! 

Personal hygiene uses skills from a variety of executive functioning categories, but in particular organizational, planning, time management, and self regulation.

Managing chores can operate on similar principles to personal hygiene schedule but may also be subject to the needs and preferences of people who are living with us. 

Whereas if you shorten your hygiene schedule one morning it might affect your day, missing a chore might impact someone else. 

Making sure we get our chores done can make heavy use of our self-monitoring, task initiation, working memory, and planning skills.

One reality of a shared living space is sharing its tools and resources with everyone else who lives there while still being able to meet your own needs and work toward your own goals. 

A major component of executive functioning beyond simply completing tasks is deciding how we allocate our time, energy, and resources and how we can coordinate those things to our greatest benefit, and existing in a shared living space is a great example of this dynamic! 

Skills associated with navigating shared schedules, resources, and spaces might include meta-cognition, time management, adaptable thinking, and planning.

While we often correctly associate executive functioning with meeting our responsibilities and obligations, it is important to remember that one of the best things about learning executive functioning skills is that we can employ them to pursue our own goals, whether that goal is to get a high paying job or to become a Magic: the Gathering streamer. 

The process of meeting our own needs and goals includes identifying those things, monitoring our progress, and revisiting from time to time in case anything has changed. 

Some crucial skill categories that help with meeting personal wants, needs, and goals include meta-cognition, self-regulation, self-monitoring, adaptable thinking, and planning.

We hope these examples of executive functioning in the home help to illustrate how broad a role these skills can play in our lives, and all the different ways we can practice it based on our own context, needs, and goals. 

Speaking of goals, next time we will be taking a closer look at how we might choose to set executive functioning goals in a school or classroom setting. 

In the meantime, if you have an executive functioning related experience you’d like to share or something related to executive functioning you’d like to see us expand on, just drop us a line at helllo@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next week with Part 2.