
Purpose: Welcome students, introduce Dr. Shifrin’s practical and clinical approach, explain executive functioning, and set expectations.
Purpose: Help students understand time blindness and build practical strategies for making time more visible and manageable.
Purpose: Help students understand why starting tasks is often the hardest part and teach low-friction ways to begin.
Purpose: Help students understand working memory and create external systems instead of relying on memory alone.
Purpose: Help students understand emotional regulation challenges and learn tools to pause, reset, and respond.
Purpose: Help students create planning systems that are simple, visible, flexible, and realistic.
Purpose: Help students understand inconsistent motivation and create practical motivation supports without over-medicalizing dopamine.
Purpose: Help students reduce mental clutter, decision fatigue, shutdown, and task overload.
Purpose: Help students create realistic routines that are small, flexible, and sustainable.
Purpose: Summarize the course and help students choose a simple path forward.
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. (While the content of this course was created by Dr. Joshua Shifrin, there is an AI voiceover to assist with narration.) Welcome. I’m Dr. Joshua Shifrin. I’m a licensed psychologist, Diplomate of the American Board of School Neuropsychology, Nationally Certified School Psychologist, an ADHD – Certified Clinical Services Provider, and I too have struggled in the past with ADHD and executive functioning. I’m glad you’re here. If you are an adult with ADHD, suspect you may have ADHD, or simply feel like focus, organization, planning, and follow-through are harder than they seem to be for other people, this course is for you.
Executive functioning is the set of mental skills that helps you manage life. It includes planning, prioritizing, remembering, starting, stopping, organizing, regulating emotions, tracking time, and following through.
Think of executive functioning like the management system of the brain. It helps you answer questions like: What matters right now? What do I do first? How long will this take? What did I promise to do? How do I keep going when it gets boring? How do I pause before reacting?
For many ADHD adults, intelligence is not the issue. Motivation is not the whole issue. Caring is not the issue. The challenge is often that the brain’s management system is inconsistent. Some days you can do a complicated project under pressure, and other days answering one email feels impossible.
This course is designed to help you stop asking, Why can’t I just do it? and start asking, What support would make this easier to do?