Frank
You ever watch someone just… do a thing? They need to make a phone call, so they pick up the phone and make the call. Task identified, task completed, on to the next one.
I’ve watched that happen my whole life and wondered what that must feel like. Because for me, a phone call isn’t a phone call. It’s a negotiation with my own brain about whether this phone call is actually necessary, whether I can do it later, what I’m going to say, what they’re going to say, whether I wrote down the account number, whether this is even the right number, and somewhere in the middle of all that internal noise, I’ve burned twenty minutes and still haven’t dialed.
That gap between “task exists” and “task begins” has a name. Some people call it executive dysfunction. I call it the executive function tax, because that’s exactly what it is: overhead charged on every transaction, whether you can afford it or not.
What Executive Function Actually Is
Executive function is the set of cognitive processes that handle planning, initiating, prioritizing, and following through on tasks. It’s the mental project manager that takes a goal and breaks it into steps, then gets you started on step one.
When it works right, it’s invisible. You don’t notice it any more than you notice your lungs.
When it doesn’t work right, everything has a surcharge. Not just hard tasks. Every task.
For people with ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, or any combination of those things, executive function is often the weakest link in an otherwise functional brain. And the tricky part is that it doesn’t always look like a weakness from the outside. Sometimes it looks like laziness. Sometimes it looks like avoidance. Sometimes it looks like a highly capable person who somehow can’t make themselves respond to an email.
The Invisible Overhead Nobody Explains
Here’s what the tax actually looks like in practice, because I’ve lived it for 55 years without fully understanding what I was dealing with until recently.
Task initiation cost. Before I can start anything, my brain wants to fully understand the task, anticipate every possible obstacle, and confirm that starting is the right move. That process takes energy. It happens whether the task is filling out a form or deploying a new Docker container. The form might actually cost more, because it’s boring enough that my brain refuses to cooperate.
Context switching cost. Every time I stop one thing and start another, there’s a re-entry fee. It’s not just getting back up to speed on what I was doing. It’s re-engaging the internal project manager, reminding myself why the task matters, and fighting through the initial resistance all over again. People who say “just do it in five minutes” don’t understand that the five-minute task might have a fifteen-minute startup cost.
Working memory drain. If I don’t write something down the second it occurs to me, it’s gone. Not “I might forget it later.” Gone immediately, replaced by whatever I just looked at. So I compensate by writing everything down, which creates its own overhead: managing the notes, reviewing the notes, trusting the notes.
Decision fatigue interest. Small decisions accumulate. What to eat, what to work on first, whether to answer that message now or later. By early afternoon, my decision-making is noticeably worse than it was at 9 AM. For someone with a normal executive function account balance, this might be a minor dip. For me, it’s overdraft territory.
Why High Capability Makes It Worse, Not Better
This is the part that took me a long time to understand.
Being good at your job doesn’t exempt you from the tax. If anything, it obscures the problem for longer. I spent 28 years in IT, built dozens of real-world apps from scratch, managed Exchange environments supporting hundreds of thousands of employees. Clearly the brain works. So when a simple task feels impossibly hard, the conclusion I always landed on was that something was wrong with my motivation, my attitude, or my character.
That was the wrong conclusion.
High-functioning people with executive dysfunction often develop elaborate workaround systems. Rigid routines, meticulous notes, over-preparation, arriving early to everything so there’s no pressure. These systems work well enough that the underlying problem stays invisible, especially to yourself. You just think you’re someone who has to try harder than everyone else to do basic things.
You are. But not because you’re broken. Because you’re running a system that charges more for every operation.
Practical Ways I’ve Learned to Work With It
I’m not going to pretend I have this solved. I don’t. But a few things have genuinely helped.
Externalize everything. My brain is not a reliable storage system for tasks, intentions, or plans. Trilium Notes, physical notepads, calendar reminders, voice memos in the truck. If it isn’t written somewhere I’ll actually see it, it doesn’t exist.
Reduce initiation friction. The hardest part of most tasks is starting. So I try to make starting as cheap as possible. For code projects, that means always leaving a comment at the stopping point that tells future-me exactly where I am and what the next step is. For email, it means drafting responses immediately even if I’m not ready to send. Getting words on screen is the battle.
Batch decisions. I try to make as many small decisions as possible in advance or in batches, rather than one at a time throughout the day. What I’m going to work on, when I’m going to eat, what I’m ignoring until tomorrow. Fewer real-time decisions means more budget for the tasks that actually need mental horsepower.
Stop fighting the tax and start accounting for it. If I know a task has high overhead, I budget time accordingly. A one-hour task that carries a thirty-minute startup tax is a ninety-minute task. Pretending otherwise just means it doesn’t get done, and then I feel bad about it on top of everything else.
The Takeaway
The executive function tax is real, it’s not evenly distributed, and it has nothing to do with intelligence, work ethic, or how much you care about the thing you’re avoiding.
If you recognize this in yourself, stop diagnosing it as a character flaw first. There might be an actual neurological explanation worth exploring. That conversation changed a lot for me, even at 55, even after decades of building workarounds without knowing what I was working around.
And if someone in your life seems to struggle with tasks that look simple from where you’re standing, consider that you might be seeing the task and not the overhead. The overhead is where most of the work actually happens.
