Executive Dysfunction: Why Starting Simple Tasks Can Feel Impossible

Have you ever had so much to do that you somehow ended up doing absolutely none of it? Not because you didn't know what needed doing. Not because you didn't care. You knew exactly what you needed to do. You just couldn't seem to start.

This has been a problem for me for as long as I can remember. Give me something urgent with a deadline breathing down my neck and somehow I can spring into action. Give me plenty of time and a perfectly reasonable list of things that need doing, and my brain can apparently find seventeen other things to do instead or nothing at all.

For years, I thought I was just disorganised. I tried planners, calendars, productivity apps, time blocking and the Pomodoro technique. I've written more to-do lists than I care to think about. I've rewritten the lists, colour-coded the lists and made new, improved versions of the lists. The lists were never really the problem. The problem was actually doing the things on them.

Knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to start

A normal to-do list might tell me to reply to an email, make an appointment, sort some paperwork, clean the bathroom and prepare something for work. Perfectly reasonable. Except my brain doesn't necessarily look at that list and think, right, let's start at the top.

Instead, it seems to look at everything at once. Which one's most important? Which one should I do first? How long will that take? Do I have everything I need? Actually, number four looks easier. Maybe I'll do that first. Although I should probably make a cup of tea before I start. And suddenly I'm doing something completely different, or nothing at all.

This is one of the things that can happen with executive dysfunction. Executive functions are the mental processes involved in things like planning, prioritising, organising, switching attention and getting started. When those processes are difficult, even something that looks incredibly simple from the outside can feel surprisingly hard to begin. Knowing that something is important doesn't necessarily make starting it any easier. Sometimes, for me, it seems to make it harder.

I didn't need another to-do list

Eventually I realised that I didn't need a better way of recording everything I had to do. I already knew what I had to do. What I needed was something that would stop showing me all of it at once.

I wanted to be able to decide what needed doing and break it down beforehand, but when it was actually time to do it, I wanted to see just one thing. Not the whole morning routine, not seventeen jobs and not a beautifully organised dashboard showing everything I hadn't done yet. I just wanted something to tell me what to do next. Then, when I'd done that, it could tell me the next thing.

That was the idea that eventually became Faffalot.

I built Faffalot because I needed it myself

I didn't originally set out to build a business or invent the next great productivity system. I was trying to solve a very specific problem in my own life. I needed something that worked with the way my brain actually behaves, rather than the way productivity apps seemed to think it should behave.

So I built something ridiculously simple. I put the thinking and organising in beforehand. Then, when it was time to actually get things done, Faffalot gave me one step at a time.

And something changed. I started getting out of the house earlier. I started arriving at work earlier. I remembered things I'd normally forget. Tasks that I'd been avoiding became easier to begin because I wasn't looking at the whole enormous thing anymore. I wasn't suddenly a different person; I'd just stopped asking my brain to manage the entire plan while simultaneously trying to carry it out.

Then other people tried it

At first, Faffalot was just for me. Then I let friends and family try it, and they got it. People who also struggled with getting started, feeling overwhelmed or wandering away from what they were supposed to be doing understood immediately why seeing one thing at a time could feel completely different from looking at another list.

That was when I started wondering whether this strange little thing I'd built for myself might actually help other people too. So I decided to put it out into the world.

Faffalot is now available free on the App Store

Faffalot isn't going to magically make executive dysfunction disappear. I still get distracted. I still avoid things. I still occasionally set off to do one perfectly simple job and find myself doing something completely unrelated half an hour later. But it has changed the way I get through my day.

When my brain can't deal with the whole thing, I don't need to deal with the whole thing. I just need to know what comes next, and then I can do the next thing after that.

Faffalot is free to download on the App Store. I built it because I needed it, and I'm putting it out there because I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

Download Faffalot free on the App Store