Task management and autism

Dealing with executive dysfunction

If you have autism and/or ADHD, you probably understand that life can feel hard to manage sometimes (especially as an adult). So-called "executive dysfunction" is one of the most common difficulties neurodivergent people face in a world built for neurotypical brains; many of us spend significant time and energy trying to manage responsibilities and care for ourselves at the same time.¹

Many medical providers, therapists, and articles on the web will suggest using a task manager to externalize tasks. This makes sense: the more you rely on your memory to keep track of tasks, the more you use up your valuable (and limited) supply of executive function capacity. I can personally attest to this. After never using any sort of planner or todo list in high school, I began using Todoist in college to help me manage school-related tasks, and it was indeed a game changer. Similar apps like TickTick, Things, Google Tasks, Apple Reminders, etc. all achieve the same goal: keep track of tasks so you don't have to.

The problem with task managers

Keeping track of tasks is important for executive function of course, however it's only a single piece of the puzzle. Prioritizing tasks, starting and switching between tasks, estimating time, and filtering distractions are all examples of executive function skills required for daily living. For neurotypical people, these things can take time, energy and effort, but not nearly as much or as often as they do for neurodivergent people. Particularly for those of us with autism and/or ADHD, it can be extremely difficult to redirect and focus our attention on the right things at the right time. Reminders, notifications, alarms, etc. can all help, but only if your tasks are properly organized, scheduled and prioritized at all times.

Task managers are good at remembering things for you, but they are quite poor at actually managing tasks for you. With most task managers, you are expected to manually create, plan, prioritize and schedule your tasks. You assign a priority level, date/time and maybe a duration, label, etc. and then edit these attributes yourself as needed. If you carefully plan out your day or week you may be on track for a time, however things inevitably change as new tasks and events pop up, other tasks must be postponed, and priorities must adjust. Ultimately, you are the real "task manager", and the app is merely there to record and sync tasks between devices.

When the system becomes another task

Every task added to a task manager creates a few more invisible tasks: decide where it belongs, determine how important it is, estimate how long it will take, choose when to do it, and remember to update the plan later. None of these decisions are especially large on their own, but together they can become a considerable amount of work. The more complicated your life becomes, the more time you must spend maintaining the system which is supposed to make it less complicated.

This arrangement also tends to work best when everything goes according to plan. Maybe you wake up with less energy than expected, an appointment runs long, somebody asks for your help, or a task simply takes twice as long as you thought it would. Now the rest of your carefully planned day is wrong. A traditional task manager can tell you that six tasks are overdue, but it generally cannot decide what should move, what should remain, or what is still realistic. Repairing the plan is left to you at precisely the moment when you may have the least capacity to do so.

Eventually the task list stops representing reality. Notifications become easier to dismiss, overdue tasks accumulate, and opening the app itself begins to feel stressful. At that point abandoning the system can provide immediate relief, even though it means returning to the original problem of keeping everything in your head. This is not because task managers are useless or because their users lack discipline; most of these apps are simply built to solve the problem of remembering tasks, not the problem of executive dysfunction.

A tool intended to compensate for difficulties with planning and prioritization should not require constant planning and prioritization in order to remain useful.

Managing attention, not just tasks

A list of everything you could possibly be doing is rarely what you need in the moment. Usually, the more useful question is much smaller: What should I do next? Answering it may require considering deadlines, existing commitments, available time, location, energy, and the cost of switching away from whatever you are already doing. It may even be that the best answer is to take a break rather than attempt another task.

Planning also needs to be resilient. A plan should be able to change without requiring you to reconstruct it every time reality gets in the way. Fixed commitments need to remain fixed, while flexible tasks should be allowed to move around them. Missing one task should not make the rest of the schedule progressively less trustworthy. The system should absorb ordinary disruption instead of turning it into another planning session.

How Subroutine aims to help

This is the problem I am trying to address with Subroutine. Rather than another todo list, Subroutine is being designed as an executive-function scheduler: a tool which carries some of the planning work instead of only recording the result. You tell it what needs to be done and provide the constraints which actually matter, while the scheduler finds time for flexible actions around fixed commitments. When plans change, those actions can be moved and the plan can recover instead of simply becoming outdated.

Subroutine also aims to reduce the amount of information and decision-making presented at once. Instead of repeatedly confronting you with an entire backlog, it should surface a smaller set of actions which make sense for your current time and context. The goal is not to produce a theoretically perfect schedule or take away your control; it is to remove enough routine decisions that starting the next useful thing becomes easier.

I think of Subroutine as an executive-function prosthetic rather than a cure for executive dysfunction. No app can account for every part of a person's life, and different people will need different kinds of support. Subroutine is still in active development, and many details of this approach are still evolving. Future posts will go further into its scheduling model, how it represents context, and the design decisions involved. For now, the guiding idea is simple: the task manager should do more of the task management.