Part 1: Five Skills to Create Your Executive Functioning Intervention Framework

Executive function is often defined as “having good time management skills”. While this isn’t completely off-base, it’s a vast oversimplification.

The REASON people are good at time management is because they have the ability to estimate and sense the passage of time. 

Most “textbook” definitions of executive functioning don’t fully call this out, and as a result many educators and clinicians have a difficult time figuring out how to design instruction and intervention that supports executive functioning. 

Instead of embedding support across the day, interventions get siloed in special education, or lumped into long lists of cookie cutter classroom accommodations that overwhelm general education teachers. 

Kids don’t generalize skills from one setting to another, even though people think they’re working on “time management”, and well-meaning adults find themselves giving constant “five minute warnings” as they try to help their students keep up with the pace of classroom activities or even basic functional tasks (e.g., getting things together, making transitions). 

Let’s be honest: If “five minute warnings” were an effective method of teaching executive functioning and “time management”, we wouldn’t have to be doing them constantly. 

What if there was a way to help kids develop these skills, so we could fade all the prompting? 

The good news is, there is. 

The first step is recognizing that the core skill we’re teaching is TIME PERCEPTION. 

When you google a definition of executive functioning, you’ll likely get a list of 8 or 9 skills. Things like attention, working memory, shifting, ideational fluency, and self-regulation. 

It’s important for educators, clinicians, and school leaders to understand these terms and what they are, but then they need to organize these abstract cognitive skills into concrete skills that can be both taught explicitly and layered across a students’ day. 

That’s why the framework I teach organizes executive functioning into 5 areas: 

1. Time perception
2. Self-talk
3. Future pacing
4. Episodic memory
5. Encoding. 

In this first episode of a 5-part podcast series, I discuss the first one: Time perception.

In this episode, I’ll reveal:

✅ What “time perception” means in the context of executive functioning (beyond simply knowing how to tell time).

✅ How time perception deficits interfere with task initiation, sustained attention, and task completion.

✅ Why students may appear "defiant" or "unmotivated" when the real issue is inaccurate time estimation/perception.

✅ How poor time perception creates barriers for following schedules, meeting deadlines, or pacing tasks appropriately.

✅ Intervention principles to help build a student’s internal sense of time as part of a larger EF support plan.

In this episode, I mentioned my upcoming free live virtual training hosted by Parallel Learning that’s coming up on August 14, 2025 from 6:30-8:00 PM EST. It’s called “Executive Functioning: Beyond Checklists and Planners”. 

You’ll earn a free CEU, get to learn about a company that offers remote work opportunities, and get to learn some of the concepts I teach in my paid programs. You can sign up for the training here.

I also mentioned my free training for school leaders who want to create a research-based executive functioning implementation plan for their school teams. You can sign up for the training here.