About Executive Function Skills
Executive function skills make your workdays more productive and less stressful.
We coach 13 areas of executive functioning.
Executive functioning refers to the cognitive processes that help us set goals, plan, and get things done. We rely on these skills to execute tasks on a daily or weekly basis. Challenges with executive function are incredibly common, whether due to a disability, a recent event, or other reasons.
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The capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue or boredom.
Productive Behaviors:
-Minimizing distraction
-Staying focused
-Choosing what to focus on
-Preventing or transitioning out of hyperfocus
Challenging Behaviors:
-Constantly distracted
-Zoning out
-Jumping between tasks
-Difficulty preventing or transitioning out of hyperfocus
-Feeling fidgety or struggling to stay engaged in a long conversation or meeting
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The ability to express yourself.
Productive Behaviors:
-Clearly communicating your ideas
-Asking questions to get the information you need
-Advocating for your accommodation needs
-Navigating difficult conversations, engaging in meetings
-Reflectively or actively listening,
-Saying “no”
-Giving constructive feedback
-Receiving constructive feedback
Challenging Behaviors:
-Difficulty managing relationships with stakeholders and leaders
-Misunderstanding social cues or group dynamics
-Engaging in tense conversation or email
-Appearing not to listen or being disengaged
-Difficulty saying “no”
-Providing ineffective feedback
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The ability to weigh multiple options and choose a course of action.
Productive Behaviors:
-Making informed choices that reflect your priorities
-Making choices in a reasonable amount of time
-Considering how a choice will impact different aspects of your work, school, or life
Challenging Behaviors:
-Struggling to prioritize or weigh options
-Making decisions without gathering relevant evidence
-Allowing perfectionism to cloud judgment
-Ignoring how a choice will impact different aspects of your work, school, or life
-Experiencing decision freeze, or feeling like you cannot. make a choice
-Ignoring how a choice will impact different aspects of your work, school, or life
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The ability to control and organize email.
Productive Behaviors:
-Organizing email folders
-Prioritizing which emails to act on
-Minimizing email clutter
-Limiting when you check or get distracted by your email
-Turning emails into to-do items
Challenging Behaviors:
-Spending too much time on low-priority email
-Getting overwhelmed by the number of emails you receive
-Constantly checking or getting distracted by new email
-Reading and forgetting about email
-Not responding to emails in a timely manner
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The ability to resist urges, pause and think before saying or doing something.
Productive Behaviors:
-Pausing and thinking before you say or do something, make a choice, or make a purchase
Challenging Behaviors:
-Inappropriate communication
-Making choices that lead to unwanted consequences
-Making decisions too quickly
-Struggling to emotionally regulate
-Lashing out in frustration or anger
-Spending beyond your budget
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The ability to maintain your personal and household priorities.
Productive Behaviors:
-Consistent morning/evening routines
-Managing and dividing daily/weekly tasks, chores, and home projects.
Challenging Behaviors:
-Feeling overwhelmed with or putting off home chores
-Lacking household routines
-Having a messy or disorganized home environment
-Struggling with daily routines (breakfast, showering, exercise etc.)
-Missing/not scheduling personal appointments or forgetting bills
Even if you don’t experience barriers to executive function, learning new strategies in these EF areas can help you work more effectively, find more work/life balance, and better support your colleagues.
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The ability to store and remember information.
Productive Behaviors:
-Remembering new information
-Remembering deadlines
-Remembering where things are
Challenging Behaviors:
-Forgetting things you have learned
-Losing things
-Struggling to prepare for a certification exam or test
-Learning new skills
-Remembering new information
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The ability to create and maintain systems to keep track of information or materials.
Productive Behaviors:
-Keeping your physical space functional and efficient
-Keeping technology functional and efficient
-Being able to find things
-Knowing where items belong
-Having a routine to maintain organizational systems regularly
Challenging Behaviors:
-Feeling overwhelmed in space
-Misplacing things
-Cluttering spaces
-Struggling to maintain technological systems of organization
-Lacking systems for keeping track of important dates or meetings
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The ability to thrive in stressful situations and to cope with uncertainty, change, and performance demands.
Productive Behaviors:
-Taking care of your needs
-Setting boundaries
-Following provider recommendations
-Getting exercise and practicing mindfulness.
Challenging Behaviors:
-Feeling overwhelmed from too many things to do
-Not dedicating enough time to your needs
-Engaging in negative self-talk
-Lacking routines to de-stress
-Not getting enough sleep
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The ability to read or write efficiently enough for work and life.
Productive Behaviors:
-Comprehending what you read
-Effectively annotating texts and emails when needed
-Organizing claims and evidence in a logical sequence
-Writing without major grammatical errors
-Using technology to support proficient writing (spellcheck, speech to text, etc.)
Challenging Behaviors:
-Misunderstanding or not identifying central ideas within a text
-Making grammatical or spelling errors
-Struggling to organize claims and evidence in a logical sequence
-Immediately forgetting what you read or having to reread the same paragraph repeatedly
-Writing in a stream of consciousness
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The ability to begin projects without undue procrastination in an efficient or timely fashion.
Productive Behaviors:
-Being able to choose when you want to start a task
-Starting tasks on time without delay or distraction
Challenging Behaviors:
-Procrastinating
-Trying to start something but not getting anywhere
-Feeling overwhelmed by a task
-Feeling “stuck,” bored
-Trying to do anything other than starting the task that needs to get done
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The capacity to estimate how much time one has, how to allocate it, and how to stay within time limits and deadlines.
Productive Behaviors:
-Being on time
-Making realistic time estimates
-Being aware of how time is passing
Challenging Behaviors:
-Being late
-Rushing or going too slowly
-Not being aware of how long things take
-Thinking less time has passed than actually has
-Miscalculating parts of a task and how much time they take
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The ability to operate efficiently for work purposes.
Productive Behaviors:
-Identifying priorities
-Planning how to use your time
-Breaking down and managing tasks
-Capturing and tracking to-do items
-Meeting deadlines
-Making realistic commitments
-Setting work boundaries
Challenging Behaviors:
-Constantly putting out fires
-Jumping between tasks
-Struggling to make sense of ambiguous tasks
-Lacking structure at work
-Not accomplishing what you want within work time
-Missing deadlines
-Being overcommitted
-Feeling like things just sneak up on you
1:1 Executive Function Coaching
Interested in working with an executive function coach from The How Skills? Our Masters and Doctorate-trained educators are experts in pedagogy and executive functioning, and we specialize in helping tech employees and managers do their best work with less stress.
Whether or not you have an ADA-qualifying condition, Microsoft offers executive function coaching to support you and help you succeed in your role.
99%
of Microsoft employees who participated in workplace coaching agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied with their coaching experience overall.
At The How Skills, our mission is to reshape how workplaces function by establishing inclusivity as the new norm.
Group Learning & Live Coaching Events
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Office Hours: Annual Review Preparation
6.15 | 12:00 - 1:00 PM PST
Prepare for employee reviews by brushing up on how you deliver feedback, and ask questions of our workplace coaches.
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Coach Q&A: Task Initiation Strategies
6.16| 7:00-8:00 PM PST
Submit your questions anonymously about task initiation and procrastination and we’ll share advice during a live Q&A.
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2024 Kickoff: Goal Setting Webinar
6.28 | 7:00 - 8:00 PM PST
Join our coaches for a 30-minute webinar of strategies for starting the new year with SMART goals and how to progress toward them.
Live Events Led By Expert Coaches
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![Alexander Stern Headshot]()
Alexander Stern
Senior Coach, Manager
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![Samantha Dieguez Headshot]()
Samantha Dieguez
Senior Coach, Manager
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![Kandice Brantley Headshot]()
Kandice Brantley
Senior Coach
Ask a Coach
Have a specific question you want to ask a coach? Send us a message and we’ll respond as soon as possible. You can also opt in to anonymously have your questions featured in our live Q&A sessions, because you probably aren’t the only one with that question.
Microsoft Employees Share about Their Coaching Experiences
“The best thing about the workplace coaching is that it's 100% customized to your needs. You have enough time to explore different approaches and to see what's working and what isn't. In fact, the coaching was so useful that I found ways to apply the strategies to my personal life as well."
— Microsoft Employee
“It was deeply beneficial to learn more about executive functioning and the ways a manager can support a neurodivergent employee. The tactical tips also enabled me to communicate in a way that more effectively answered my report's questions, helped them better understand their expectations, and provided options for them to more productively collaborate with teammates.”
— Microsoft Director
"Coaching was honestly life-changing with regards to procrastination, shifting my focus from rewarding outcome to rewarding process. I was given a number of tools to help me to return from procrastinating. I no longer live in fear that I might not be able to start a project. It's like a new outlook on work life."
— Microsoft Employee
FAQs
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The How Skills specializes in personalized coaching for executive function skills. We work one-to-one with employees, managers, teams, students, and adults to develop tailored strategies and tools that help people do their best work. Together, we develop sustainable systems for a more productive, fulfilling, and balanced approach to learning, working, and navigating life.
We’ve also been working with Microsoft since 2020 to help both employees and managers improve how they work and build a culture of inclusion. -
We know that executive function coaching can make a huge difference for people with and without disabilities. That’s why Microsoft has expanded this program to help any employee who wishes to work with a coach in a 1:1 capacity access these resources as a benefit.
We also encourage employees to involve their manager or supervisor in our three 30-minute manager support sessions throughout the course of their program. When we can work with both the employee and their supervisor, this is where we see the most success. The goal of these sessions are to provide education and resources to a manager to enable them to better support you. All content/topics discussed in your coaching sessions will remain confidential and will not be shared with your manager or supervisor.
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Microsoft encourages and welcomes every employee to avail themselves of these resources, whether or not they have disclosed a disability or a particular executive functioning challenge to their supervisor or HR. That said, The How Skills does measure aggregated usage data to ensure our content and services are meeting Microsoft’s needs.
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