In 2005, licensed clinical psychologist Anna Levy-Warren launched Organizational Tutors, a New York City-based business focused on helping children develop and strengthen executive functioning skills.
It wasn’t long before the parents hiring her to guide their children in time management, organization, focus, and self-regulation were asking how she could help them, too. It was immediately clear to Levy-Warren that something bigger was at play.
These clients were not hapless, lost adults without careers or direction. These people were lawyers, CEOs, and executives. And still, below the very polished veneer of achievement, they were struggling to manage the constant barrage of calendar invites, text messages, and mounting to-dos in their very demanding professional and personal lives.
What’s more, Levy-Warren says, buried under the weight of demands for attention and focus, these parents were riddled with mounting anxiety. In 2017, Levy-Warren partnered with her colleague Chelsea Saunders, whose doctoral work focused on transformational change and flourishing, to co-found a new kind of tutoring service—one focused on adults. While the pair started with about 30 clients their first year, Levy-Warren says, by 2018 they’d outgrown their ability to meet demand and began adding other clinicians to their practice.
With Steel Advising, Levy-Warren and Saunders and their team at any given time help roughly 75 to 100 adults sharpen their executive function skills and build successful strategies in a wide range of roles, from first-year law firm associates to C-suite executives. “So many adults are being asked to perform and process information at a faster speed,” says Levy-Warren. “They have to manage more stimulus and keep more focus, but without the skills. We weren’t taught this in school.”
Executive function is the brain’s air traffic control center, where we manage our time, plan and execute projects, juggle multiple, simultaneous tasks, and regulate the emotions tied to duties requiring motivation and grit. As our world has become ever-more complicated regarding how we receive, process, and organize information, our attention spans have shrunk. Experts in the space like Levy-Warren contend that as a society we need to build a new framework to help adults develop executive function.
Adam Zamora is senior director at the Child Mind Institute’s ADHD and Behavior Disorders Center and has separately run a private educational consultancy for 18 years focused on exactly this skill set. When explaining the challenges he sees in his work with executive function, Zamora points to an episode of the popular children’s show Bluey.
In it, one character gets lost on the way to pick his son up from school, after his phone dies, cutting off the navigation app mid-route. Immediately, panic sets in and the dad starts to question aloud how he’ll make it to school. When the child in the back seat asks his dad why he doesn’t know the way, the dad responds, “I just put on satnav and zone out.” The episode follows along as this father is nearly unable to figure out how to find the school, completely flustered by the technical glitch.
“That is really representative of what’s going on,” says Zamora, noting how the episode illustrates how technology has become an increasingly integral part of how we live, work, and relate to one another. It’s also part of the reason that as a society, our executive functioning skills are challenged.
For some, gaps in executive function come up as we’ve gained greater familiarity with neurodivergence and have more regular diagnoses of anxiety, learning disorders, or ADHD, says Zamora. In many other cases, he says, it’s just a matter of being out of practice. We’re all on autopilot, following along with what our phones tell us to do, he says. “It’s about knowing how to visualize the steps that it takes to get from A to B,” says Zamora. While the Bluey reference may seem a silly—and maybe basic—analogy to tech’s hold on the most mundane aspects of daily life, it’s also so relatable, timely, and troubling, says Zamora.
In her book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Happiness, Balance, and Productivity, Gloria Mark states that, overall, our attention span is decreasing, as we log more time on screens and are required more regularly to switch between opposing tasks and their related mental modes. Mark’s research at the University of California Irvine shows that an average attention span of 75 seconds in 2012, dropped in 2016 to an average of 47 seconds.
In Levy-Warren’s work, meeting the needs left in the wake of these technological and cultural shifts comes in the form of $300-per-hour, one-to-one coaching, as well as company-wide trainings to help organizations massage a skillet often overlooked in the interview and training process. A private session with Levy-Warren, Saunders, or one of their colleagues focuses heavily on individual needs, whether that’s time management, organization, or strategies for focus, as well as uniquely tailored action plans to build skills and overall effectiveness. “We have so many different ways of communicating,” says Levy-Warren. “Calendar invites, text messaging. ‘Shifting sets’ is what we say in cognitive language. We don’t have a way of helping people approach and process material differently. It used to be a legal pad. Now, it’s so many steps and so much orientation around how to organize your mind.”
Filling the gap in these skills isn’t as simple as building a color-coded calendar, creating an organizational system, or a motivating morning routine. The solution is far more nuanced and brain-based, says Levy-Warren. “It’s the intersection of executive function and psychiatric wellness,” she says. “It has a lot to do with how you feel about yourself. Help me do the things I need to do, and hold in mind that when you tell me to use a calendar, I’m flooded with anxiety. It’s about holding space for all of those complex intersections. . . . It’s a real misunderstanding of how brains work.”
The way this plays out for clients at Steel begins with a level of curiosity about their behaviors. That, says Levy-Warren, is where the “growth edge” is. Once she and Saunders have a feel for that edge, they can push it, while understanding whatever cognitive delays that may be blocking progress. For instance, says Levy-Warren, a 30-year-old could be 40 in the way she writes, but more like a 13-year-old in the way she manages her project deadlines at work.
All of these factors play into how that individual feels about herself, and how she comes across to her bosses and colleagues at work. Addressing the big picture—everything from sleep, nutrition, mental wellness, and emotional health—is about building actionable strategies to keep people accountable, as well as the organizations they work for continuously tuned in to their employees’ related cognitive and emotional loads.
Behavioral scientist Jeffery Sanchez-Burks is a professor at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business and says the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated what was already brewing below the surface. Now, with remote work and hybrid schedules, the subject is incredibly pressing for organizations hiring and developing the next cohort of leaders. “There is a really serious need to ramp up empathy and emotional intelligence across organizations,” says Sanchez-Burks. “We need it big time. . . . I think there’s an illusion that there used to be neuro-homogeneity, and now there’s divergence. We were just able to ignore it and now we can’t.” Instead, he says, organizations need to help people acknowledge the different ways our brains work and find ways to incorporate those varied approaches into daily life and the way we work.
It’s no surprise then, that businesses like Steel are receiving more requests than ever before, fielding referrals from therapists whose patients need additional support, as well as businesses hoping to meet employees where they are, setting them up for success within an organization. “There is only so much money you can throw at this problem,” says Levy-Warren. “If you look at neurodiversity, you should strengthen everyone’s scaffolding. There are all different kinds of entry points, but how we do this is by really understanding that this is something everyone needs when they enter a new workplace.”
