In The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, Tony Attwood defines executive function as a term that includes the following skills:

• Organizational and planning abilities
• Working memory
• Inhibition and impulse control
• Self-reflection and self-monitoring
• Time management and prioritizing
• Understanding complex or abstract concepts
• Using new strategies

Attwood goes on to say that most people with Asperger’s Syndrome have some level of executive-function impairment (Attwood, 234).

At one time or another, I have found most executive-function skills to be a challenge. At present, my difficulties tend to be in the areas of working memory, organization and planning, and time management. 

Making lists has always been my strategy for coping with these executive-function deficits. Over the course of my life, my lists and I have had a rocky relationship. Sometimes, I labor over them lovingly. At other times, I declare my independence of them entirely. Ultimately, I always come home to them with an odd mixture of desperation and limitless hope. It’s only now, at the half-century mark of my life, that my lists and I have settled down to a mutually agreeable existence.

Working memory

My fears about my poor working memory have always been with me, but as a child, I could not consciously express them. Instead, I made lists that reflected just how frightened I felt about forgetting people, places, and things.

The first lists I can remember contained identifying information about photographs I took in 1970 and 1971, when I was twelve and thirteen years old. I still have these photographs. Every single one has the following information on the back:

• The full name of each person in the photo
• The address, city, state, and zip code of each person in the photo
• The age of each person in the photo
• The date the photo was taken
• The location in which the photo was taken

I can vividly remember my state of mind when I was documenting this information. I felt as though I were doing a rote homework assignment in a thorough and conscientious way. I concentrated on my handwriting so that it was consistent across photos. All the information being there, every time, no matter how redundant (and it was quite redundant) was absolutely crucial. These lists calmed me and helped me to feel safe.

The people in the photos are generally my parents, my brother, and myself—not people whose names, addresses, and ages I’d be likely to forget. I now see this odd ritual as an expression of my fears about my working memory—that is, about my tendency to forget my thoughts very quickly. That I was afraid of forgetting the names and addresses of my parents and brother when I was still a child indicates just how deep my fears went.

Organization and planning

Up until recently, I believed that my organizational abilities were quite advanced. And, in some ways, they are. For example, if I am faced with a chaotic array of objects (like an overstuffed attic or a floor covered with toys), I can easily see the categories into which the objects fit, and I have no problem putting them in order.

For several years, I worked a full-time job as a technical writer out of my home office, and along with my former husband, I homeschooled my daughter. In those years, my life was a triumph of strategic planning. I had a schedule that showed what time to begin and end work, when to get exercise, when to homeschool, when to take my daughter to her flute lesson, what books we’d taken out of the library, and when we needed to bring them back. I had lists of the writing projects I was working on, along with milestones, deadlines, and meeting times. I had sublists showing the tasks I still needed to complete for each project. Along the way, I was making more lists. I was planning curricula (with accompanying book lists) and documenting each day’s homeschooling activities (in a list with subheadings) for the school district.

I’m sure you will be thrilled to learn that I consistently got everything done on time. My lists were flawless. The superintendent of schools was amazed. My co-workers thought I was super-human. So did I. Of course, I was irritable, overwhelmed, anxious, and exhausted most of the time, but since everything was moving along so well, what did it matter?

In the light of my Asperger’s diagnosis, I can now see that I was able to organize and plan the daylights out of myself, but I had no sense of what was appropriate to plan for. I never took into consideration my feelings, my energy level, my stress, or my health. My present husband recently pointed out that I was like the Road-Runner, speeding along, right off a cliff. Remember Road-Runner? Everything was fine, so long as he never looked down. The minute he did, he plummeted to earth.

Something like that has happened to me in the past six years. I got divorced and remarried, and along the way, I quit my job and decided to devote myself simply to being a homeschooling mom. Once my daughter began going to school, I saw how helpless I felt without a work schedule or a homeschooling list. As I’ve let go of the things I used to do so efficiently, I’ve begun to see just how much all that efficiency was masking significant deficits.

Time management

My most serious executive-function deficit is my inability to manage time. For me, this problem is related to having a poor working memory. I often forget to do the simplest tasks. I now have a series of lists that help me get through the day so that I take proper care of myself and meet my responsibilities to my family.

I began making these lists when I was a child. When I was in the seventh grade, I wrote down what to do in the morning before school. The list was handwritten and quite specific, with the proper time for doing each activity, such as brushing my teeth and putting my books in my bag.

I was very embarrassed about having this list, and I never showed it to anyone. I felt like a silly child who had to be told the simplest things. Over the years, I’ve continued to make lists, all the while feeling ashamed that I had to write down the tasks that other people had learned to do effortlessly decades before.

Since my diagnosis, I have learned that because I have a sensory processing difficulty, I need reminders of what to do, and in what order to do them. Learning the proper sequence of tasks has been a challenge.

My lists no longer have the hour and minute at which I must do something. That level of specificity made me feel like a prisoner; ultimately, I would rebel and throw the list away entirely. The logic of my current lists came mostly by trial and error (which is why the lists are in pencil). But now I have lists in which I have a great deal of confidence.

Here is my morning list:

AM

• Stretching and situps
• Put on sweater and hat
• Floss and brush teeth
• Comb hair
• Use deodorant
• Use hand cream
• Get dressed for working out
• Set out warm pajamas for tonight
• Make bed
• Give cat food and water
• Rinse tofu
• Have fiber powder in juice, water, vitamins, etc.
• Have breakfast (cereal, fruit, soymilk) and do dishes
• Walk or bike
• Dress for the day
• Put out workout clothes for tomorrow
• Turn on cellphone

The morning list was easier to put together than the evening list. It may be my difficulty with transitions. The morning transition is the easiest one: I’m just waking up. As the day goes on, the activities I want to do start to compete with the tasks I need to do. Once I get started on something, my hyper-focus can take over and make the transition to a new task very difficult. I’ve now succeeded, however, in putting together a workable evening list.

The great thing for me about having these lists is that if I get off-track because something else has grabbed my attention, I have a way of getting back to the basic things that need doing. Having a visual reminder of what to do is enormously comforting. All that anxiety about forgetting what to do has diminished. For the first time, my life has a rhythm that comes from within and a pace that makes sense.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg