Executive functioning: Why smart people still struggle to manage

Executive functioning is what lets people manage daily life without everything falling apart. It’s the mental ability to plan, prioritise, focus, regulate emotions, and actually finish what you start. 

What is executive functioning?

You see it in ordinary moments. Remembering to pay the electricity bill before the reminder turns red. Starting work without scrolling for forty minutes. Cooking while answering a call and not burning the curry. Keeping it together when three people need you at once. When executive function works, life moves, but when it doesn’t, everything feels heavier than it should.

This has nothing to do with intelligence. Some of the sharpest people struggle badly with follow-through. Executive functioning lives in the prefrontal cortex and is easily disrupted by stress, poor sleep, burnout, anxiety, depression, and ADHD. In other words, modern life is not exactly designed to protect it.

Culturally, we’re terrible at recognising this. In Indian households especially, “manage” is treated like a moral obligation. You’re expected to juggle work, family, social duties, and emotional labour without complaint. When someone drops the ball, the default verdict is laziness or lack of discipline. Rarely do we ask whether the load itself is unreasonable.

Look at the professional who excels in meetings but misses deadlines. The student who studies for hours yet can’t submit assignments on time. The parent who remembers everyone else’s needs but forgets their own appointments. These aren’t motivation problems, but executive functioning problems.

Technology hasn’t helped at all. Flexible work hours often mean no real boundaries and notifications demand constant attention. Productivity culture insists you should be self-driven at all times, with no structure provided. The brain is expected to do all the organising, all the time. That’s not how it works.

The fix isn’t willpower, but solid support. External structure matters: calendars, reminders, routines, written lists, fixed work hours, smaller task chunks. These don’t work like crutches, but more like practical workarounds. Offloading thinking to systems frees up mental energy for actual work.

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