What are Executive Functioning Skills?
Those with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), executive functioning deficits, or hoarding disorder tend to be weak in executive functioning. Executive functions are self-regulating skills that we all use to accomplish tasks, from getting dressed to doing homework. They include planning, organizing time and materials, making decisions, shifting from one situation to another, controlling our emotions and learning from past mistakes.
What is Executive Functioning Skills Training?
Executive functioning skills training involves specific techniques and strategies to help adults, teenagers, and children to stay on top of their daily responsibilities or schoolwork. Some basic skills to help someone with ADHD or hoarding disorder establish routines and get work/tasks/schoolwork done successfully include:
Those with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), executive functioning deficits, or hoarding disorder tend to be weak in executive functioning. Executive functions are self-regulating skills that we all use to accomplish tasks, from getting dressed to doing homework. They include planning, organizing time and materials, making decisions, shifting from one situation to another, controlling our emotions and learning from past mistakes.
What is Executive Functioning Skills Training?
Executive functioning skills training involves specific techniques and strategies to help adults, teenagers, and children to stay on top of their daily responsibilities or schoolwork. Some basic skills to help someone with ADHD or hoarding disorder establish routines and get work/tasks/schoolwork done successfully include:
- Checklists/To Do Lists: Can be useful for anything from getting out of the house on time in the morning to organizing a room to grocery shopping to doing homework after school to the bedtime routine. Since the steps necessary for completing a task, throwing out materials, or organizing a room or backpack, often aren’t obvious to people with ADHD or hoarding disorder, defining them clearly ahead of time, and posting them prominently, makes a task less daunting and more achievable.
- Using a Planner is essential for individuals with ADHD who have what’s called poor working memory, which means it is hard for them to remember things like doing laundry, a major work deadline, and homework assignments.
- Time and Task Management: It is important to assign a time limit for each step, particularly if it is a bigger, longer-term project. Deadlines can sneak up on all of us, but those with ADHD are particularly susceptible to underestimating how long it will take to do something.
- Materials Management: Skills involve creating a plan and system for organizing materials such as papers and identifying a routine for organizing/sorting (of backpacks, lockers, desks, rooms).
- Stimulus Control: Creating an environment that decreases distractions such as covering distracting areas or turning off TV/phone/computers while completing a task.
- Problem Solving: Learning to identify a problem, change negative view of the problem, set realistic goals, generate solutions, decide on and carry out a solution, and evaluate whether the solution worked or not.
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