Executive functions: working without willpower, from your desk to your Russian funnel

“I don’t have the willpower.” That is how owners explain why the site has not been rebuilt, the report has not been written and the strategy has spent a third month in drafts. A company selling into Russia from abroad has its own version: the project is approved, the budget exists, and nothing moves.

It is a comfortable explanation and a dead end. As a diagnosis, willpower gives you nothing to measure and no idea how to build more of it. Behind the phrase sit executive functions: the brain’s ability to send attention and energy where you need them, rather than where things are easiest.

While you believe you are short of some inner muscle, you wait for the right mood and blame yourself when it does not come. Once you see the mechanics, you have levers.

I will describe them as a channel that water runs through. The law that pulls your attention to your phone instead of the report also governs the customer who abandons a basket halfway through checkout. A company working in Russia from another country meets both halves of that law at once.

Why willpower explains nothing

Imagine asking a contractor why conversion fell and hearing “luck turned against us”. You would let that contractor go. “I lack willpower” is the same answer addressed to yourself. It sounds like a cause and contains no action.

Your energy is always flowing somewhere: into the task, into messages, into worry. The flow is a given. What you can change is the channel it runs in, and you change that through setup rather than strain.

Four ways to shape the channel

Executive functions reduce to four simple operations on the channel. Each changes the conditions in which attention works by itself.

Narrowing is focus. You close the side branches and force the flow into one channel: twenty tabs shut, notifications off, a meeting room with a laptop and no phone. The report that “wouldn’t come” all day gets written in forty minutes, because the flow has nowhere else to go.

Widening is the search for ideas. Sometimes you need the reverse. You let attention spread: a walk with no goal, free writing, a talk with a colleague about nothing in particular. This is where a new offer or an unusual angle for an ad tends to come from.

Redirecting is switching tasks. You are reading the same paragraph for the third time. The classic mistake is to keep pushing. The better move is to put the strategy down and edit ad copy, where resistance is lower. While you work there, the first task rests and its resistance falls. An hour later you come back and the text moves.

Deepening is long work on one thing. Brand strategy, a funnel breakdown, a large unit economics calculation: this work cannot be done in fifteen-minute pieces between calls. You set aside a channel of the right depth and keep the flow from spilling over.

In none of the four are you fighting yourself. You change the shape of the channel and the water goes where it is easiest.

Why “pull yourself together” never works

The command is an attempt to push water uphill. The channel slopes down towards your phone and your inbox, and you are shoving the flow up towards the report. You open a messenger “for a second”, glance at the news, and come to twenty minutes later in a feed.

Scolding yourself for that makes as much sense as scolding a river for running downhill. So the working strategy runs opposite to habit: make the action you need the easiest one available.

Lower the resistance in the target channel. Prepare a template, open the file in advance, cut a big task down to a first step so small it would be silly to skip. “Write the strategy” frightens. “Open the document and type three points” does not.

At the same time, raise resistance in the channels you don’t want. Put the phone in another room rather than face down on the desk. Make reaching the distraction slightly harder than starting the job.

Why the Russian project stalls first

For a team selling into Russia from another country, the Russian work is usually the steepest channel on the desk, and the slope explains more than anyone’s discipline.

Look at what surrounds it. Home marketing runs on Google Ads and Google Analytics, tools the team opens without thinking. The Russian work means Yandex Direct and Yandex Metrica. Direct has an English interface, but search terms, customer messages and reviews arrive in Russian, and the ads have to be written in Russian and pass moderation. The first payment asks for document verification. Moscow sits at UTC+3 all year, and the calendar has its own gaps: the New Year break runs through the first week of January, and May has a cluster of public holidays.

None of this is hard on its own. Each item adds a little resistance at the entrance, and the sum is enough for the Russian task to lose to anything familiar, day after day, without anyone deciding to drop it. Then a meeting concludes that the market lacks interest.

The fix follows the same law. One named person, one open document, one first step small enough to finish before lunch, such as pulling last month’s search terms and getting them translated. Changing the slope does more than another deadline.

A plan is a map of channels

This is why an ordinary task list works so badly. A list names destinations and stays silent on how to flow there, and attention lives in the how.

A working plan accounts for real resistance at different times of day. After a bad night, heavy analysis will not move, so routine takes the morning slot and strategy moves to your energy peak. A bypass is written in advance: if the landing page sticks, I move to ad edits, so a jam in one task stops costing you the day.

A failing plan was drawn for an ideal world: strategy from nine to twelve, meetings until two, operations after that. At nine the resistance to strategy is enormous and energy leaks into email. By lunch you are worn out and nothing is done, though the plan was “right”.

Owners see the same with staff: a perfectly written procedure loses to the way that flows more easily. The channel was laid against the terrain.

How to lay out your week by channel

First find your energy peak. Put only deepening work in that window: strategy, analysing numbers, hard decisions. Email flows perfectly well on low energy.

Then mark tasks by type of channel. What needs quiet and one job? What needs freedom and a walk? What can sit in reserve for when the main task sticks? Sorted this way, you stop trying to write strategy on a broken day between three calls.

Keep the entrance to every important job very short. The file is open from the evening before. The draft starts with one line. If the first half hour goes to a feed, the day rolls after it.

The same law runs your customers

Everything above applies to your customer too. They also flow along the path of least resistance, and when you build a funnel you either lay a channel downhill for them or make them push water up.

A person rarely abandons a basket because they changed their mind. A barrier rose at the entrance to payment: mandatory registration, one extra field, unclear delivery. Resistance in the “buy” channel became higher than in the “close the tab” channel, and the flow left.

Good marketing is laying that downhill channel: fewer steps, data filled in ahead, a first micro-step so light that starting is the easy option. When I review campaigns in Yandex Ads, half of the conversion growth comes from removed barriers rather than from new creatives. Brand work does the same thing: a strong brand lowers resistance at the entrance, because the person no longer has to decide afresh whether you can be trusted.

Where the slope differs from the Western playbook

The law is universal. The terrain is local, and a funnel copied from home keeps the slope of home.

The starting point. Western conversion advice assumes a journey that begins on Google. In Russia search runs largely through Yandex, Google suspended ad sales there in 2022, and many everyday purchases begin on Ozon or Wildberries. For many categories the marketplace is the habit your site competes with.

Payment. Visa and Mastercard cards issued abroad do not work in Russia, and Russian cards do not work with most foreign payment processors. The local habit is a Mir card or the Faster Payments System, so a checkout built around a European provider can be a dead end at the moment the wish to buy is highest.

First contact. An email address and an English form make a narrow channel. Russian customers are used to writing to a business in a messenger and expect a quick reply in Russian.

The form. Russian personal data law requires consent to data processing, so a form needs a consent line and a privacy policy link. Cut every other field you can.

Seeing the resistance. Google Analytics 4 shows events and the drop-off between them. Yandex Metrica adds Webvisor session recordings, scroll maps and form analytics, so you can watch where a real visitor stops.

What to do if you sell into Russia from abroad

1. Walk the path as a Russian buyer. Ask a Russian speaker to go from a Yandex search on a phone to a paid order, and note each place they stop.
2. Open Metrica, beyond the counter. Set a goal for each step and watch Webvisor where the drop is largest.
3. Remove before you buy traffic. Paid clicks only bring more people to the same barrier.
4. Give first contact a downhill route. A messenger button, a reply in Russian, one short form.
5. Lay your team’s channel too. Name the owner of the Russian work, set a small first step for Monday, and plan a bypass for the holidays.

If you want to find where the flow hits a hill in your business, start with a free review. Often the job comes down to two or three barriers removed at the narrowest point of the funnel or of your working day.

Willpower is a story about a muscle nobody can find. Anyone can lay a channel.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Исполнительные функции: работа без силы воли