Where your brain gets stuck, concretely.
20 questions across Barkley's 5 dimensions.
Russell Barkley, clinical psychologist and researcher for over 40 years, is my reference on adult ADHD. Before reading his book Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, I spent whole evenings watching his free YouTube lectures. The line that stayed with me: ADHD isn't an attention disorder, it's a self-regulation disorder. And self-regulation is another name for executive functions.
Barkley published in 2011 the Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale (BDEFS) with Guilford Press. It's the most widely used self-report scale to measure executive deficits in adults. Long version 89 items, short form 20. The BDEFS is under copyright, so this test does not reproduce the official items. It draws from the 5 Barkley dimensions with freely rewritten questions. 20 questions, 4 per dimension, frequency scale on 4 levels.
The result gives your total score out of 20, the breakdown by dimension, and the most affected dimension. Above 12, the deficits are marked enough to suggest an ADHD executive profile or disrupted functioning. This is not a diagnosis. It's a reflection tool that points to executive blockages and that justifies, if your score is high, an adult ADHD screening followed by a clinical evaluation.
I struggle to estimate how long a task will actually take.
1. Time management (self-management to time). Estimating how long a task will take, feeling time go by, meeting a deadline that isn't immediate. Barkley talks about time blindness. The ADHD brain doesn't really feel "in three weeks". It feels "tomorrow morning". Between the two, it's foggy. That's what explains why we deliver everything at the last minute, even when we had weeks for it.
2. Organization and problem-solving (self-organization / problem-solving). Breaking a big task into steps, prioritizing what's urgent, holding several sub-tasks in mind without losing them. This is the dimension that makes you start three projects in parallel and forget to come back to the first one. It's also the one that makes your workspace fall into disorder fast, not from laziness, but from an inability to maintain structure without constant cognitive energy.
3. Self-restraint (inhibition). Not interrupting, not saying what crosses your mind, not acting on the impulse to buy, commit, reply. Barkley considers inhibition the most fundamental executive function, the one the others depend on. Without inhibition, no planning is possible: you have to be able to pause the impulse to think about what comes next.
4. Self-motivation. Starting a boring task without external pressure, finishing what has no immediate payoff, holding on when the reward is distant. This is the dimension that makes you wait until the last minute, because urgency creates the fuel your brain can't generate on its own. Without a deadline and without someone waiting, it's very hard.
5. Emotion regulation (self-regulation of emotion). Recovering after a frustration, moderating a strong reaction, not letting one emotion spill over the whole day. This is the most underestimated dimension of adult ADHD. Many people diagnosed late discover that their emotional instability, which they took for a personality trait or a separate disorder, is actually part of the same executive wiring.
You can cross-check with the adult ADHD test. The executive score isn't enough on its own. If you stack a high BDEFS score (12+ out of 20) and a high ASRS v1.1 Part A score (4+ out of 6), you have two converging signals that justify a clinical evaluation. The ASRS test is available here: adult ADHD ASRS v1.1 test.
You can start externalizing without waiting. Barkley has a rule that hit me in Taking Charge of Adult ADHD: "Externalize information that is usually held in the mind." Get the information out of your head, put it in physical form, where the problem is. It's the direct application of the fact that ADHD working memory can't hold the load. The review of Taking Charge of Adult ADHD details the 8 practical rules from the book, and the selection of his YouTube lectures covers the same content for free.
You can put concrete scaffolding in place. The page organization with an ADHD brain covers the systems that actually work when working memory fails. The page ADHD procrastination comes back to self-motivation and task initiation. Without a diagnosis, these are already tools that change daily life.
This test is inspired by the Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale (BDEFS for Adults), designed by Russell A. Barkley and published by Guilford Press in 2011 (ISBN 978-1606238783). The BDEFS comes in a long version (89 items) and a short form (BDEFS-SF, 20 items). The scale is under Guilford Press copyright, so this test does not reproduce the official items. It freely rewrites the questions from the 5 dimensions of the Barkley model: self-management to time, self-organization / problem-solving, self-restraint, self-motivation, self-regulation of emotion. For the clinically validated original, the BDEFS manual is available from Guilford Press.
For the full theoretical model, see Barkley RA, Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved, Guilford Press, 2012, and the clinical application in Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, 2nd ed., Guilford Press, 2022.
What this test is not: a medical diagnosis, a substitute for the official BDEFS, or a label to wear. It's a free reflection tool that points to executive blockages. If your score is high, cross-check with an adult ADHD screening (ASRS v1.1) and present both to a trained clinician.