Can someone give me some examples of what struggling with executive functions looks like for an adult with adhd?

What I do is I’ll get distracted and end up doing a dozen things at once but crucially … I finish them all! So I will keep going as if driven by a motor sometimes… but I will not leave anything undone because my environment is really important to me and I like everything immaculate.

you’ll just see me half way through unloading the dishwasher, putting a wash on, polishing, batch cooking a berry crumble, putting together a new desk …. But it’ll all be done!

So you can’t really compare people tbh. I do not thrive in a chaotic environment so won’t live in one

"Wait mode" is a killer. If I have a meeting at 2pm, I have to do nothing until that meeting in case I forget it. So I literally just sit, on MN or playing stupid games, waiting for 2pm. I know it is illogical, but my brain just shrieks 'Stop! Wait! Don't forget!' and my body reacts as if there is a crisis about to occur unless I sit still.

I work with a lot of overseas clients who are all so impressed that I am happy to have meetings at 5-7am, but for me that is bliss. Over and done with, then I can concentrate on the day ahead.

My friend has ADHD. An example is I invited her to a party I was planning, she accepted the invitation, saying she’d love to come (I was paying caterers and needed to have an accurate idea of numbers).

Day of party rolls round, I checked in with her to see if she was still coming. She was away on a camping trip and had completely forgotten about having accepted my invitation.

Please can I ask how you retrained your brain to focus better?

Honestly I think even non ADHD people do this because our attention spans have changed since smartphones. So I wouldn't take that in itself to be a sign

I made an effort to re-train my AuDHD brain and now get through loads of books. Reading is really helpful for ADHD brains.

This is me, too.

I'm AuDHD.

Paralysis with tasks - I physically cannot do something I need to do, unless motivated by something do it.

Hyperfocus - I won't eat, sleep, keep track of time or even realise I'm in pain when I'm in hyperfocus mode.

Either under or overstimulated - it's very draining and uncomfortable to be always too bored, or too overwhelmed.

Deadline driven - hugely motivated by deadlines, it causes a lot of needless stress to leave things until last minute.

Where did I put that? - spending needless energy finding something I just put down.

I can't focus on one job, and even within each job, it's chaos. For example, if I'm painting a room, I'll be sorting paperwork and washing up, then continue to paint the room - but not where I stopped, in a different area of the room.

It's absolutely the podcast and in my case the audiobook. And my thoughts. Completing a task that's mostly muscle memory while my brain goes as fast as the car is actually grand.

It can be things like knowing you need to do something but just not being able to get started, forgetting what you were doing halfway through, losing track of time or feeling overwhelmed by basic tasks. If you’re looking into whether ADHD might explain some of this, you could have a look at ADHD Certify too. They have some useful information and offer online services if you want to explore it further.

Well, I agree, but when I had to explain to my team leader the way I couldn't hold the beginning of an essay in my head until the end, I could tell she thought I wasn't capable of the work. And I absolutely am. It was just that I have to work many times harder than an average examiner. But the meds reset me to the NT level. The contrast is so great it makes work a pleasure.

ADHD crosses all boundaries. Professional, academic, age, gender, ethnicity.

I'll come back to this properly but here are some initial thoughts. - I'm an extreme case so I'd like to give some crazy examples of the really stupidly basic things I cannot do without stimulant meds (while having been a high achiever academically). It's baffling being able to win awards in complex subjects but not being able to wash your plate after a meal to the point that after 6 months there are no plates and you cannot wash the dirty ones and have to call your parents to do it for you while they shout at you and you cry and repeat over and over again that you don't know why you can't do this but you just can't. I see other people with ADHD take a long time to get round to it but then have this burst of functionality. That burst never comes for me without meds. I just start off in a nice tidy house because my parents have tidied it for me then over and over again it descends into total squalor. Even if I drop something on the floor like a piece of food I won't be able to pick it up unmedicated. I went through a phase of throwing everything I had effortwise at overcoming this problem (before diagnosis) and I could spend hours staring at the food on the floor, fighting with my brain, reasoning with it that this wasn't difficult and if I could win prizes in x, y and z, I could pick up a tomato I'd dropped on the floor and yet after hours of reasoning it still was on the floor and I'd eventually give up and go to bed. The tomato would rot and go mouldy and I still couldn't pick it up. Still invested hours standing near it willing myself to just bend over and pick it up but always walked away after hours of not succeeding. Baffling thing was first time I tried meds these problems just disappeared. I could just pick things up I dropped on the floor and it felt effortless. Didn't need an intervention from my despairing parents who couldn't understand what was wrong and couldn't understand why I wasn't doing these basic things when I couldn't be accused of laziness with my academic record. ADHD is not a minor issue for some of us. It's debilitating. If I'd had kids they would have been removed from my care. Thank god I didn't as people who knew I was struggling would tell me I'd be able to do it when I had to. I would not have been able to do it under any circumstances except with stimulant medication which just magically solves the problem. Problem is, I can't take stimulant meds any more due to another health condition so I would be back to square one if i hadn't met a wonderful man who does these things for me and believes me when I say I can't do them. He lived with someone else with a very similar profile before me and I think he realised that she was an extreme case. Highly successful at work but couldn't wash dishes, pick clothes up of the floor or clean or tidy. She was so distressed I think he knew eventually that it was real.

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I have 80000 (yes eighty thousand) unread emails. Apparently that is not normal.

My adult daughter has ADHD but it doesn’t manifest the way you describe. She can do all those things you mention but sometimes struggles to prioritise or get timings right. Over the years though she has put coping methods in place to help. Executive function struggles is not the only way ADHD can manifest.

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Thats exactly what I do but I don't have Adhd. I just think I'm easily distracted and need to get better organised. Low and behold it never changes! I have loads of emails I know which one I'm meant to prioritise but then something else comes in so I start looking into that and my brain can't seem to deal with leaving that as it plays on my mind. I think it's just bad time management. I also lose things all the time and always late. What makes something Adhd and not just part of your personality/ brain function as everyone does things differently? My brother had what I would say is the typical Adhd traits, he was a nightmare to live with, impulsive, couldn't sit still, couldn't sleep as brain couldn't switch off, did dangerous things as no sense of danger, got expelled from school, not caring of authority, always late, drug use due to dopamine hit. I think those kind of traits need a diagnosis as it ruins lives. I'm just interested as there are loads of these threads with people thinking they have Adhd with symptoms of disorganisation. I'm wondering if people are looking for excuses for not being organised, and I'm one of these disorganised people so no judgement! I just wonder does having the diagnosis actually change anything? It can't change how your brain works. Thank you, sorry if it comes across as rude it's not meant to.

And alarms and reminders set for everything which you then ignore or ‘snooze’ or think ‘ooh I’ll just do that’ then get distracted and forget

He passed his test and is fine driving in the arse end of nowhere where he grew up, but moved away and decided that there were too many cars, too many people and too many idiots to be safe. To be fair, it's a lot easier on the eyes to be driving surrounded by green with just the odd Kamikaze sheep or cow to worry about.

That makes sense. Driving takes high executive functioning.