Executive Cognitive Function Skills: How To Improve Them And Why They Matter

I know… I keep hearing the same reverberations…

• “There isn’t enough time.”
• “I have so many OTHER priorities.”
• “I’ll do it NEXT week.”
• “I don’t have time to _____ every week.”
• “I thought about it, and…”

One of the KEY REASONS you can’t get everything done is because your Executive Cognitive Function (ECF) skills can’t cope with the DEMANDS you make of them.

• You can’t speed read because you can SEE THE LETTERS, but can’t PROCESS the words that fast.
• You can’t manage all your ‘time buckets’ for the SAME REASON.
• You can’t accept there are ENOUGH HOURS in a week…
• Your comfort zone is too small…
• You can’t live in your discomfort zone long enough…
• Your beliefs are TOO restricted and Mindset FIXED…

All manifestations of a deficiency in your Executive Cognitive Function (ECF) skills.

But here’s the good news, you can develop those skills!

Your Comprehensive ECF Skills Development List

1. Coordination, Motor Control & Dual-Tasking

• Juggling 3 balls; progressively attempting 4 balls.
• Bouncing a table-tennis ball on a bat, particularly with the non-dominant hand.
• Learning and practising short dance routines.
• Playing Simon Says.
• Patting your head while rubbing your stomach, then reversing the movements.
• Balancing on one foot while simultaneously doing another activity.
• Jumping on a mini-trampoline while introducing variations or cognitive challenges.
• Incorporating unfamiliar or deliberately challenging movements into workouts.

2. Cognitive Flexibility & Breaking Patterns

• Deliberately interrupting habitual mental patterns.
• Recognising an automatic thought or response and consciously reframing it.
• Taking familiar journeys without relying on Google Maps.
• Exploring new walking or running routes.
• Trying unfamiliar activities rather than automatically repeating familiar routines.
• Changing the way you perform familiar exercises—for example, substituting a single-leg deadlift for a conventional deadlift.
• Adding creative or unfamiliar shots into squash.
• Learning new movement patterns rather than simply repeating established ones.

3. Working Memory & Mental Manipulation

• Doing mental arithmetic—for example, calculating the running total of a grocery shop before reaching the checkout.
• Solving progressively challenging maths problems.
• Memorising and using a new “word of the day”.
• Recalling the events of the day and reconstructing what happened and when.
• Learning short sequences, such as dance routines, and reproducing them from memory.
• Creating words spontaneously to fit an existing song or rhythm.

4. Improvisation & Creative Problem-Solving

• Improvisational singing—creating words spontaneously while maintaining the structure/rhythm of a song.
• Developing creative shots during squash.
• Finding new ways to perform familiar movements or tasks.
• Creating new games, challenges or variations from existing activities.
• Solving problems under changing constraints rather than simply following a familiar procedure.

5. Attention, Inhibition & Response Control

• Playing Simon Says, particularly when instructions change rapidly.
• Performing activities that require you to inhibit an automatic response and substitute a different one.
• Deliberately switching between two competing movement patterns.
• Performing a familiar task using the opposite hand.
• Combining physical movement with a simultaneous cognitive task.
• Using a Pomodoro timer to practise sustained attention and deliberate task switching.

6. Planning, Sequencing & Organisation

• Visualising your time blocks before beginning the day.
• Creating and following a consistent daily routine.
• Planning unfamiliar outings or experiences.
• Designing new family activities rather than defaulting to established routines.
• Creating a reward/tracking system that requires monitoring progress towards goals.
• Planning a sequence of movements, actions or decisions before executing them.

7. Novelty & Learning

• Learning new dance routines.
• Learning new baking recipes and following an unfamiliar sequence of instructions.
• Learning new teaching, engagement or digital tools.
• Experimenting with unfamiliar technology or setups.
• Trying new activities and experiences.
• Exploring unfamiliar places.
• Learning new skills that require both attention and active problem-solving.

8. Physical Activities With a Strong Cognitive Component

• Juggling.
• Dance.
• Balance exercises.
• Coordination drills.
• Table-tennis ball control exercises.
• Trampoline exercises with movement variations.
• Weightlifting when learning new movement patterns or deliberately varying technique.
• High-intensity exercise when combined with a cognitive or coordination challenge.

9. Reflection & Metacognition

• Reviewing the day’s events and recalling the sequence in which they occurred.
• Identifying habitual patterns in your thinking or behaviour.
• Deliberately reframing an established way of thinking.
• Reviewing performance and asking, “What could I do differently next time?”
• Monitoring whether you are relying on automatic behaviour or actively engaging your cognitive skills.
• Writing things by hand.

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Activities That Support ECF—but Aren’t ECF Training Per Se

I would not put these in the core ECF activity list, but they are ECF-supporting behaviours:

• Getting consistently good sleep.
• Maintaining strong sleep/readiness scores.
• Regular physical activity and maintaining daily movement.
• Walking 10,000 steps per day.
• Wearing blue-light glasses to reduce eye strain.
• Using red light for retinal/eye-health purposes.
• General strength training.
• General high-intensity workouts.

Similarly, listening to new podcasts and simply trying new places to eat introduce novelty, but aren’t necessarily ECF exercises.

The Key Principle

Thmost important Detailed Distinction is therefore:

Don’t confuse NOVELTY with ECF TRAINING.

A new experience becomes much more useful for ECF when it requires you to remember, inhibit, switch, plan, improvise, coordinate, solve, balance, sequence or adapt.

That gives us a much more useful test for adding future activities:

“Does this activity force my brain to do something cognitively demanding that it wouldn’t normally have to do?“

If yes → ECF development activity. If it merely feels different or novel → probably not ECF training.

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Low Executive Cognitive Function (ECF) skills don’t just create personal inefficiency—they create operational problems that compound across a small business.

• Poor working memory → Forgetting commitments, follow-ups, deadlines and important details.
• Poor attention → Missing emails, errors, instructions and important signals from customers or staff.
• Poor inhibition → Reacting emotionally, making impulsive decisions or sending messages that should have been reconsidered.
• Poor cognitive flexibility → Getting stuck when circumstances change; continuing with processes that no longer work.
• Poor planning → Constantly firefighting instead of anticipating problems and preparing ahead.
• Poor prioritisation → Spending time on urgent/easy tasks while strategically important work remains undone.
• Poor task switching → Fragmented attention, unfinished work and reduced productivity.
• Poor sequencing → Doing things in the wrong order, creating avoidable rework and bottlenecks.
• Poor problem-solving → Repeatedly treating symptoms rather than identifying and fixing root causes.
• Poor self-monitoring → Failing to notice recurring mistakes, ineffective habits or declining performance.
• Poor cognitive flexibility + inhibition → Difficulty delegating, changing direction or letting go of “the way we’ve always done it.”
• Poor executive control overall → The owner becomes the bottleneck, the business becomes reactive, and growth becomes increasingly difficult.

Low ECF often looks like a business problem—but the underlying constraint is frequently the owner’s ability to think, prioritise, regulate, adapt and execute effectively.

In a small business, the owner’s cognitive capacity becomes an operational capacity constraint.  

#Ouch