[This EF blog post is second in a three part series and follows Part I: The Invisible Struggle with Planners—”I was unsupported, not undisciplined.”]
Almost 20 years after receiving my first planner in middle school, my therapist started mentioning this concept of ‘executive function.’ She mentioned it here and there in conversations, and for a while, I dismissed it. I had already given up on the idea that new information could fix what felt so hardwired in me.
But one day, I was feeling especially curious and decided to look it up. Something clicked. I found myself looking at a breakdown of individual executive function (EF) skills, and suddenly, I felt a fog lifting. Everything I had struggled with now had a name—a framework. I finally had a way to think about and talk about my daily struggles. For the first time in a long time, I had hope that maybe, just maybe, my car, my house, and my life might one day feel manageable.
As I looked back with this new lens, I realized something else: the school planners I was always given—and traditional planners in general—failed to support my brain. They created visual overload, relied on dense, inflexible layouts, and lacked any and all emotional supports to counter my lacking sense of self awareness. Here’s why that matters.
Neurodivergence and Planning
Planning and prioritizing, together, are generally considered to be one of the most important executive function skills we possess. As a reminder, executive function skills are the cognitive skills that allow us to function effectively in our daily lives, and these skills also include working memory, organization, emotional regulation, and impulse control.
While executive function skills are learned and develop naturally as we grow, those with neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism tend to have greater challenges in developing them to age-appropriate levels.
And the case of traditional planners presents one facet of this challenge, helping to highlight why it might be more difficult for a neurodivergent individual to utilize or refine their planning and prioritizing EF skills by using this widely applauded tool.
Visual Overload
Fact: Particularly for neurodivergent individuals, too much sensory information can trigger sensory overload, activating the nervous system’s fight, flight, or freeze response. This leads to emotional dysregulation—a state where our ability to manage emotions is compromised. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a physiological response. Emotional regulation is a core EF skill, and when it’s taxed, everything else becomes harder.
Executive function impacts how we respond to and organize sensory input. For most of us, vision is our primary mode of perception. But neurodivergent brains often struggle to filter and organize visual input. That means visual aids can backfire when they create more mental clutter than clarity.
Planners are generally designed to be small and portable, meaning that they’ll be around 8×5” and maybe 60 or so pages. That’s ideal for most folks who benefit from some like planning and prioritizing support. They can see each day relative to those immediately before and after, they can jot down important meetings and appointments.
But in terms of the actual thought processes involved in planning things out, there’s simply not enough space. Each page is jammed with several days worth of information. Each sheet is a flurry of lines, days, numbers, and boxes, covered with handwriting and whatever else. If your executive function skills are up to par, this might seem harmless enough. But to someone struggling with their executive function skills, this is a nightmare.
Imagine having a brain that can’t unconsciously pick out important information or automatically ignore irrelevant information. Now, imagine opening a planner that has five days crammed on one page, filled with lists, timelines, color codes, and tiny text. Instead of calming your mind, it floods you with a reminder of everything you need to do. It becomes harder to focus on the one task you opened the planner to support. It also may cause distress by providing a constant reminder of days that didn’t go as planned.
Dense, Rigid Layouts
Fact: many neurodivergent individuals experience time blindness—or challenges estimating how long a task will take, recall how long previous tasks took, or sense how much time has passed in a given period. Put another way, time isn’t experienced in neat little boxes. Neurodivergent minds often need more flexible time management tools—ones that reflect energy levels, transitions, and emotional capacity, not just the clock.
Traditional planners rely heavily on visual schedules—often broken down by the hour, from 8am to 5pm. For neurodivergent individuals, that structure often clashes with how we perceive time. In addition, due to the small relative size of traditional planners, each hourly block gets just a sliver of space—sometimes less than a centimeter—leaving no room to think through what’s involved (and don’t even get me started on the struggles of neurodivergence and messy handwriting).
Because of that, these rigid hourly blocks lead us to overschedule, underestimate recovery time, or forget important transitions. Standard planners rely entirely on these visual time schedules, and this frequently leads neurodivergent individuals to over-schedule their time, setting them up for failure and frustration. We set ourselves up for failure, then blame ourselves for not ‘sticking to the plan.’
Lack of Emotional Check-Ins
FACT: While many neurotypical people regulate emotions automatically, neurodivergent folks often need more intentional self-monitoring. That includes tuning into physical cues like hunger, fatigue, or stress. When we’re distracted or in motion, we might not notice how these cues are impacting our ability to focus. When you can’t check in with yourself, it becomes even harder to adapt your plans in real time.
Standard planners rarely include space to track how we feel, meaning that we must turn to a separate journal, an app, a friend, or no one at all in processing what’s going on in our inner world.
They’re task-oriented, not person-oriented. Without structured emotional check-ins, we’re left to manage our moods and mental states with already-taxed working memory, further diminishing our ability to integrate complex experiences or learn from them so we can be better in the future. It’s a setup that ignores the emotional context that underlies so many of our daily challenges.
There’s no structured way to keep track of patterns so that we can learn from them, or see how our emotions connect to our moods, sense of comfort, or energy levels. Our best shot of that is to rely on an already cluttered working memory.
Innovating Something Better
By the time of this revelation, I’d already given up on traditional planners and started making my own. They were 8.5” x 11” x .75” monsters, totalling around 300 pages and only spanning about three months, but they were built for MY brain. But they had layouts and sections that gave me room to break down my days and better take care of myself and my kids.
Over time, I’d refined the pages and made adjustments, but they pale in comparison to the versions I’ve been working on since discovering the world of executive functioning. It’s been a joy and a challenge to work on designs for new sections that mirror my executive function challenges.
In Part III, I’ll share how I translated these insights into the ThriveMind planner—a neurodivergent-friendly tool designed to support real-world executive function. You can also check out the top features of an ADHD-friendly planner here!
More from the ADHD Executive Function Toolkit:
- Executive function planner for adults
- Additional executive function tools and strategies
- What to look for in an executive function daily planner for students
References:
Neff, Megan Anna. “Understanding Sensory Overload and Its Impact on Emotions.” Neurodivergent Insights. https://neurodivergentinsights.com/sensory-overload-and-emotions/
Koay JM, Van Meter A. The Effect of Emotion Regulation on Executive Function. J Cogn Psychol (Hove). 2023;35(3):315-329. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2023.2172417. Epub 2023 Feb 8. PMID: 37791006; PMCID: PMC10544783. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10544783/.
Roggli, Linda. “‘What Does That Say?!?’ My Life with ADHD and Bad Handwriting.” ADDitude. https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-dysgraphia-terrible-handwriting/?srsltid=AfmBOoqe4n4qWRcBTCmA6_cBp8hWPc4O93owtMMpyI749Mue3Ism1bbn.
“ADHD Time Blindness: How to Detect It & Regain Control Over Time.” Attention Deficit Disorder Association. https://add.org/adhd-time-blindness/#:~:text=Time%20blindness%20in%20adult%20ADHD,time%2C%20and%20manage%20your%20schedule.
“Emotional Dysregulation.” My Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/25065-emotional-dysregulation.
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