One approach that’s helped me in the executive functioning department is choosing to believe that connecting long-term wants to short-term wants is itself a skill.
I don’t want to touch a hot stove, and yet I don’t frame my “not touching a hot stove” behavior as an executive function problem because there’s no time scale on which I want it. I don’t want to have touched the stove; that’d just hurt and be of no benefit to anybody.
I don’t particularly right-now-want to go do half an hour of exercise and make a small increment of progress on each of several ongoing projects today, but I do frame that as an executive function problem, because I long-term-want those things—I want to have done them.
It’s tempting to default to setting first-order metrics of success: I’ll know I did well if I’m in shape and my ongoing projects are completed on time, for instance. But I find it much more actionable and helpful to look at second-order metrics of success: is this approach causing me better or worse progress on my concrete goals than other approaches?
For me, shifting the focus from the infrequent feedback of project completion to the constant feedback of process efficacy is helpful for not getting bored and giving up. Shifting from optimizing outputs to optimizing the process also helps me look for smaller and more concrete indicators that the process is working. I personally find that the most concrete and reliable “having my shit together” indicator is whether I’m keeping my home tidy, because that’s always the first thing to go when I start dropping the ball on progress on my ongoing tasks in general. Yours may differ, but I suspect that addressing the alignment problem of coordinating your short-term wants with your long-term wants may be a more promising approach than trying to brute force through the wall of “don’t wanna”.
One approach that’s helped me in the executive functioning department is choosing to believe that connecting long-term wants to short-term wants is itself a skill.
I don’t want to touch a hot stove, and yet I don’t frame my “not touching a hot stove” behavior as an executive function problem because there’s no time scale on which I want it. I don’t want to have touched the stove; that’d just hurt and be of no benefit to anybody.
I don’t particularly right-now-want to go do half an hour of exercise and make a small increment of progress on each of several ongoing projects today, but I do frame that as an executive function problem, because I long-term-want those things—I want to have done them.
It’s tempting to default to setting first-order metrics of success: I’ll know I did well if I’m in shape and my ongoing projects are completed on time, for instance. But I find it much more actionable and helpful to look at second-order metrics of success: is this approach causing me better or worse progress on my concrete goals than other approaches?
For me, shifting the focus from the infrequent feedback of project completion to the constant feedback of process efficacy is helpful for not getting bored and giving up. Shifting from optimizing outputs to optimizing the process also helps me look for smaller and more concrete indicators that the process is working. I personally find that the most concrete and reliable “having my shit together” indicator is whether I’m keeping my home tidy, because that’s always the first thing to go when I start dropping the ball on progress on my ongoing tasks in general. Yours may differ, but I suspect that addressing the alignment problem of coordinating your short-term wants with your long-term wants may be a more promising approach than trying to brute force through the wall of “don’t wanna”.