The phrase arrived in my head so completely formed and concrete that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already established in the lexicon, but at least preliminary searches suggest it is not. Of the people I have said the phrase to thus far — mostly a very small group of local women and one Parisian-based knitter — 95% immediately understood without further definition. This one registers loudly. 

Executive Function Theft (EFT) is the deliberate abdication of decision-making, tasks, and responsibilities that are perceived as administrative or repetitive, of lesser importance, or aren’t pleasant or shiny, to another person, with the result that the receiving person’s executive function becomes so exhausted that they are unable to participate in, contribute to, or enjoy higher level efforts. 

When I say deliberate, it’s easy to picture a caricature villain chuckling to themselves of "oh, I am going to STEAL that executive function from Isobel and keep that precious capacity for myself!" Such extreme villains are hopefully rare as individuals, though perhaps not when we consider my corporate example below. But it is still a deliberate even if not consciously malicious choice. The thief has chosen to prioritize their executive function over another person’s and, having found that this makes their lives easier, repeats this behavior unless it is disrupted. When later called upon to carry their portion of the group executive function needed, they may become resentful or default to stereotypes (often gendered/racial) such as "oh she’s pickier than me, does it better, is just a good planner, they aren’t being tracked for leadership" or the thief may actively call to how they are busy doing "bigger picture things" with the implication that they must be protected from little things. They may also engage in willful or weaponized incompetence in order to maintain their ability to continue EFT.

Everyone Faces Corporate EFT

At one point as I work on this essay, I’m sitting on hold with the company that manages my health flexible spending account (FSA). Healthcare in the United States and attempting to manage and pay for it is an exquisite example of EFT. For example, today’s process involved:

  • Receiving a bill from a provider
  • Reviewing the bill for accuracy (this is a recurring appointment)
  • Going to the provider’s billing website and make a payment (make sure you go through the email link, otherwise, you have to loop around 6 times in search of where to pay and re-enter all the details)
  • Going to FSA website and starting the process for reimbursement, which has to be entered as three different claims (see recurring)
  • Finding out that I am back to getting paper checks despite giving them direct deposit information
  • Attempting to get help via chat –which results in an agent or chatbot who keeps not reading anything I submit "what claim number is this about?" (one I haven’t submitted yet) "just go to your settings and set up a direct deposit!" (already did that)
  • Calling and wait on hold for a customer service agent
  • Finding out that because the "initial default setting for my employer" is pay-by-check there is no way AT ALL to get them to change it to direct deposit unless I wait for the FSA company to approve the payment and cut the check and then call to have them reissue the payment as a direct deposit.
  • Pending: Monitoring the mail to receive 3 checks
  • Pending: Taking the checks over to my bank – no I haven’t moved to phone-based check deposit
  • Pending: Contacting my HR department to find out why my employer has moved to check-only as our option for reimbursement. 

Here are multiple examples of theft from me. I have to maintain and track all of the paperwork and information; I have to spend an indefinite quantity of time with each of these parts and pieces. Should anything end up not being reimbursable or cross date lines for annual healthcare years, oh no!! I have to get it all perfectly right or run into fees and demands for me to reimburse the FSA company.

The goal, in the name of the company bottom dollar, is to make it as inconvenient as possible for me to use an employer offered benefit. A truly mundane and recurrent example, unfortunately, as I try to navigate U.S. health insurance.

While corporate examples are wonderfully obvious and right to hand, Executive Function Theft also plays out on the individual level. This might be at the workplace or in the home and these are often more insidious thefts.

Workplace EFT

In the workplace, an example of EFT often plays out in the inequality of service labor, and I will specifically use academic service work here as it is my current workplace. Think of the people who end up with more than their share of administrative maintenance tasks — such as organizing get well cards, scheduling workshops, or taking notes. Consider the colleague who has a list of committee appointments a yard long and has just gotten a request to be on Another! Important! (is it?) Committee. These individuals may not be doing these tasks strictly because it is their job responsibility, but because they see a need to be filled or have been asked or tasked with taking on more service that they feel they cannot turn down. And notice how those tasks so often fall to the same group of people — especially when we get to any form of implementation or ongoing commitment rather than the "fun" ideation phase. One way to calculate these service loads would be to count the number of committees and task forces held by and expected of various individuals — who gets a pass and who gets penalized if they don’t say yes. 

Quite often there’s a gendered component as to who is tasked with these additional service responsibilities — the office housekeeping as well as the care tasks of the workplace. In their book, The No Club by Babcock, Pester, Vesterlund and Weingart summarize this gendered and imbalance service load thus:

"In our own and others’ work, we found substantive and overwhelming evidence that women more than men are tasked with non-promotable work. Less saddled with these tasks, men have the freedom to concentrate on work that helps them advance while women’s careers are stalled or stymied" — The No Club, Page 11.

I will admit to never having been able to read Cal Newport’s Deep Work all the way through — I got too irritated — but I would point to his dismissive naming of the idea of "shallow work", which he defines as logistical and often repetitive tasks, such as writing short emails. Newport recommends entirely stopping or poorly performing that work; I read this as encouraging readers to commit EFT against others around them. Too often the dump off of what are critical responsibilities is not to a specifically tasked and appreciated administrator but instead onto the junior, female, minoritized, non-tenure track, or precarious employees. It’s the maintenance work of keeping the workplace going and we do not appreciate the maintainers. Similarly thinking about EFT in the workplace, I was reminded of the guy who got famous with the Four Hour Workweek book and how we were all just supposed to outsource things to nameless underpaid gig workers. Notably, when looking for a summary of that book, I found an article by Cal Newport praising it.

"You need to read me in on that and send me updates" — this was a demand I got from a work peer a few years ago. She was demanding that I repeatedly spend time updating her personally on a professional topic where I was involved in campus initiatives. The message was that she was too busy and too important compared to me and so I needed to attend these meetings, do the labor, and then take time I didn’t have to synthesize information for her, in her preferred format, and at her convenience. I wasn’t the only one who got this kind of demand from that colleague and no, none of us did it. And yes, this would have obviously been a notably different statement had it come from a supervisor.

Executive Function Theft can lead to an inequality of time to dream, to rest, or to plan and grow professionally. If you are facing EFT in the workplace, how are you supposed to do five year goals or strategic planning? When are you supposed to be getting that significant work in that will lead you to promotion or a career change?

EFT in the Home

When I described the healthcare interactions above, did that sound familiar? Is that because you are the primary caregiver in your relationship? For brevity on an already long post, when I am talking about relationships below, I’m mostly referring to cishet romantic relationships from my own U.S. based lens but I have certainly been privy to EFT in friendships and other interpersonal relationships.

When thinking about Executive Function Theft in the home or personal relationships, the outcome that cropped up was that of decision fatigue. Does one person in the relationship have to decide what is for dinner every single night, and also to arrange all of the logistics of acquiring the food, preparing it, cleaning up after dinner, deciding what can be saved for leftovers and what needs to go into a lunch box the next day? Is their decision-making ability wholly captured in those tasks while the other person is getting to relax or to plan a project? Or think of the stereotypical holidays. "All that just doesn’t Matter and *I* have to think about [SINGLE TASK]!" a husband said in the face of a list of holiday traditions that he absolutely expected his wife to ensure happened to his expectations. Oh…and then he was annoyed that she didn’t have an opinion about how something occurred which was related to his Big Exciting Task. How often is one partner unable to actually enjoy a holiday because they had to make sure all the arrangements were made and schedules were held to, gifts were acquired and wrapped, friends and family were invited, etc? 

Two different pieces of literature came to mind when I was considering EFT in the home. One was a quote from the excellent book Equal Partners by Kate Mangino:

"While his female partner continues to do housework for twenty, twenty-six, thirty-one more hours — he can devote this time to hobbies, relaxation, exercise, hanging out with friends, sleep, work and/or continued education. Essentially, he has the opportunity to do so much more with his life than she does." — Kate Mangino, Equal Partners, Chapter 1

I felt this dovetailed nicely with a 2008 article from the University of Michigan:

"Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families." (Press Release for the study)

If a woman is doing at least 7 more hours a week of housework –think of all of the decisions that are included in that, and all of the executive function needed for her to complete that housework. What is it that she must remember which needs to be cleaned or ordered or prepared and what is the outcome of her spending that much additional time on the minutiae of the relationship or family? The thieved partner is likely focused on maintaining home functionality, so they may not even get the space or time to figure out a new system which might serve everyone better or reduce the task requirements. Beyond that, it can overall rob her of time to make bigger plans for herself or for the partnership, relationship, family. It may lead to satisfice efforts and the potential of the thieved partner feeling like a failure in situations where they see what the thief has been able to do in the time and function they didn’t have to spend making all of the decisions about dinner.

There’s a trend in short videos (Reels, Tiktoks, Shorts — chose your name) where a guy starts with "if you had me for 24 hours, what would we do" and it’s stitched with a woman running down a significant list of tasks, mostly house chores and repairs that need some planning and execution (example version here) . While a joke, it speaks to a desire for a "someone else" to hand things off to that these women often don’t appear to have.

EFT & The Mental Load & Invisible & Emotional Labor

I don’t think you can have a conversation about Executive Function Theft without also talking about the mental load and invisible labor and emotional labor. All of these concepts are connected. EFT creates a greater mental load for another individual. EFT demands ever increasing amounts of invisible labor without giving equitable time for "promotable tasks" or rest. EFT expects that Someone Else who they have assigned to be of lesser importance will take on the emotional parts of work or care tasks. I identify EFT not to ignore those terms but to build upon them. I want to try and help describe the rage of a friend recently describing the complete failure of a colleague to complete any part of year-long project he had signed up to lead, and how after she had pulled the project out and completed it after he abandoned it, he still got assigned to a position of more authority. Or I write this to clarify the exhaustion of a friend in the midst of a pandemic-exacerbated divorce describing the soon to be ex-husband passively waiting for her to deal with all of the legal paperwork and to ensure childcare arrangements didn’t infringe on the fun things that he felt took priority. I write this to name my own disgust at a company going out of their way to make my day more inconvenient in the name of their profit. 

EFT at the Intersection

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge other health and societal factors surrounding these concepts which can exacerbate the impact of EFT. My insurance example was, for me, a frustrating and inconvenient hour while I was also answering emails and working on this draft. I do not have an executive function disorder which might have kept me from working on other tasks while on hold or created further barriers for me to work through all of those steps. Nor do I have a physical disability which might require me to expend additional executive function in order to accomplish the activities of daily living, while also requiring that I navigate these systems more often than a healthy person. And I have a job where this was something I could attend to in the middle of a weekday with minimal disruption. 

Also I’ve written mostly here also about the binary gender impact. There is obviously much to reflect upon as to the further impact as EFT intersects with race and class. Returning to my academic service example, it’s a recognized issue that faculty from historically marginalized communities face exponentially more demands for committee participation "so we have representation on the hiring committee!" Chasing a shallow definition of inclusion, we regularly commit EFT from these colleagues. 

Finally, our social hierarchies and messaging about whose executive function should be protected so they can do some vaguely defined "real work"  warrant a more extensive conversation that I hope others will pursue.

Reducing EFT

Unfortunately I don’t have an exact solution for reducing EFT, as it requires either someone in a leadership or managerial role disrupting the pattern (e.g., a rotating schedule of meeting note takers and consequences when the thief screws up in an attempt to get out of it) or for someone to recognize their harmful behavior and work towards changing it. And we all are guilty of selfishness and EFT — though it is with different levels of awareness that naming this will make it useful to spot when we are offloading onto others or not valuing the executive function needed on tasks. The Babcock, et al,  and Mangino books I’ve cited above have recommendations and ideas, though sadly, I will point out that in a follow up to the No Club, the authors found that when they turned something down, another woman — usually one with less power — was asked. Systems were not disrupted.

But there are ways to engage. One tactic I’ve incorporated recently with a couple of my friends is "Do you want to be engaged with this or would you like me to just make a decision/do X?" There are times I can see their executive function fading or where it is just one decision too many for today. In those instances, I can offer to remove that decision/activity or to at least pare it down. This has to be done explicitly and with consent but their relief is palpable that I can see the struggle, identify the issue, and move forward with something acceptable that meets the need. It allows them to save a squeeze of Executive Function for other things. The caveat is that I am choosing these, not getting assigned it unrelentingly in our relationships, and they do the inverse when they have more function than I do.

In the interim, however, I hope this phrase and idea gives you the words you need and that we are all able to disrupt it, especially against the corporations wasting our precious time and decision-making skills.

Hopefully Useful Bibliography

  1. Hunt E. ‘No reward or recognition’: why women should say no to ‘office housework.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/09/they-feel-guilty-why-women-should-say-no-to-office-housework. Published May 9, 2022. Accessed August 8, 2023.
  2. Babcock L, Peyser B, Vesterlund L, Weingart LR. The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. Piatkus; 2022.
  3. Mangino K. Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home. St. Martin’s Press; 2022.
  4. Exactly how much housework does a husband create? University of Michigan News. Published April 3, 2008. Accessed August 1, 2023. https://news.umich.edu/exactly-how-much-housework-does-a-husband-create/
  5. Petersen AH. What to Actually Do About an Unequal Partnership. Culture Study. Published August 17, 2022. Accessed August 1, 2023. https://annehelen.substack.com/p/what-to-actually-do-about-an-unequal
  6. Babcock L, Peyser B, Vesterlund L, Weingart LR. Saying ‘no’ in science isn’t enough. Nature. Published online November 10, 2022. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-03677-6

The Other Books I Mentioned

  1. Newport C. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 1st edition. Grand Central Publishing; 2016.
  2. Ferriss T. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich. EBURY PRESS; 2011.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Andromeda Yelton, Dorothea Salo, Ayla Stein Kenfield, and Scarlet Galvan for their review of an earlier draft and their insightful comments. And my thanks to Franklin Habit for giving me a preliminary outlet for this idea. 

Source: hedgehoglibrarian.com