Executive dysfunction vs. laziness/not caring?

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Of course, it can always be several at once.

Today I was actually in the bathroom, cleaning it, and even though on some level I was aware that I needed to pee so badly that I was in physical pain, I kept cleaning and then went to another room to move a towel and kept cleaning in that room, and so on, until finally I was in too much pain even to clean any more and almost too much to make it back to the bathroom.

Laziness? No.

I finally did the vacuuming today. Took me four days. Ha!
Executive dysfunction for me makes me feel guilty for not doing something. Whereas lazy is me making a decision to just lie on my bed and listen to my music. I'm not the type of person who would do nothing for very long though. It makes me feel uncomfortable.
Every morning I try to get up at a certain time but my body just doesn't want to move until a certain time which is usually the exact same time I got up yesterday. I know our bodies have their own clock but this is ridiculous.

I have been having a lot of trouble understanding what exectutive function is and this discussion has helped me.

I don't think it can be compared with laziness. Being lazy is not doing something or getting others to do your work for you because you can't be bothered.

When I have a lot of trouble figuring out how to start a task I get very depressed suddenly and feel like I have to go to sleep.

Food opioid peptides, in dairy/casein and wheat/gluten, definitely make it harder for me to concentrate on daily, dull/banal, slightly complicated/multi-facetted but still somehow unexciting tasks, get organised, do things before deadlines, etc.

My inertia gets less when I exclude both of them at once for sustained periods of time.

I actually start enjoying and feeling interested in a great many "little", small-scale, "unexciting" "jobs" the longer I exclude sources of food opioid peptides from my diet.

I think that I am probably one of the 36.7% on the autism spectrum ( a third of us ) with unusually permeable intestines ( compared to 4.8% of the general population ), and that I am therefore exposed to many more of the food opioid peptides in these normal foods than most people.
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I think laziness is not bothering to do what you are interested in and are able to do if you wanted. Executive Dysfunction is not being able to do things despite trying. If you give up trying - that's laziness though. I think both go hand in hand. There is probably laziness in Executive Dysfunction. I think hard working people DO NOT have Executive Dysfunction though.

I have both issues and can distinguish.

Laziness is willful. It's a choice that is made to abdicate responsibility, usually in relation to something one finds tedious.

Executive dysfunction is more compulsive. You can hardly help it without placing external structures that guide your time. It doesn't care about your good intentions or work ethic. Want to play that new game you're excited about? Sorry... time to go around in loops alternating between ruminating and meaningless rituals all day.

And when you're finally engaged it can transform into unhealthy hyperfocusing, burning out your physiology until you have to revert to the "do nothing" loop to recover.

Yes I can honestly tick all the boxes in that first post. I'm sure it's executive disfunction. Though if I'm under enough pressure to get something done, I'll nearly always get on with it, though I'll often wait and go through quite a bit of stress (worrying about whether or not I'm going to get it done) until I really have to get on with whatever it is. Not always though - sometimes I happen to be especially aware that I'd like myself better and perhaps be more effective and efficient if I "made the effort" and cracked on before things get too critical, and then I find myself making an early start and cutting through all my usual detours. What surprises me is that it's rarely anything like as painful as I often imagine it will be.

Sometimes I like to do things in advance because I hate having to rush, and I've figured out that if I make an early start then I won't be so rushed if there turn out to be unforeseen obstacles. So I suppose I'm quite a mixture, and I don't know quite what decides which path I take for any given thing. I also find myself working way too long and hard on things once I've started them.

My take on the whole notion of "lazy" is possibly unusual. I tend to see it as a more positive thing than a lot of people do. It's commonly believed that laziness is always a bad thing. But I think differently. A lot of the time, the one who accuses another of laziness is just whinging because somebody won't do something for them - particularly employers and politicians (who often represent employers) hoping to screw more work out of people for no extra reward. I don't worship hard work. To me it's not an ethic, it's just a necessary evil, and I don't think a person who wants to minimise the work they have to do has anything to be ashamed of, I think it's natural and healthy to dislike too much hard work. A person who is content to just survive and not put in any extra work to "better themselves" might get a lot of criticism for it, but who's to say that they're doing wrong?

Like I've said, if there's enough pressure on me I'll not procrastinate, I'll get on with the job. Some would probably say "there, he can do it when you crack the whip, so the rest of the time he's just being lazy." But I don't think that's a valid argument, even though it's superficially convincing. I've often wanted to get things done purely for myself but haven't been able to because of executive function issues. I'm the only one who stands to lose when I don't meet my own targets. I've often wished that somebody would give me a push at times like that. But I'm often not sure whether I'm better off following my prescribed plans or not. Applying self-control can be a painful thing, and there's no telling whether the achievement it's in aid of will justify the means. It's often the case that when we acquire the thing we were expecting would make us happy, it doesn't. Be careful what you work for.