RE reading the article, that's where I'm getting it.
"My mind flutters from the window to reading the little scribbles people left on the desk to my imagination and then back out again" = I am observant of my environment and probably the first one to be aware of new opportunities or threats arising from that environment. And I dream.
"I'm really prone to letting my thoughts get off on the worst tangents..." = I pay attention to tangential (i.e. "touching," related) things and take action on them, investigate them. She looks them up on Wikipedia, learns all about them, and suffers no loss of attentiveness when the topic is meaningful to her and chosen by her. Given that new knowledge tends to come most readily from tangents, and not from out of the blue, and not from some well-intentioned-but-flawed, "legible" (i.e. bureaucratic/"makes logical sense"/industrialized) lesson plan, this is not a bad approach to learning. The problem only comes when you need to get through school, where those lesson plans are de rigueur and the pertinent skill is actually overruling/ignoring what you are interested in and not taking action on it. Huge waste BTW, whether ADHD or not.
"Executive function" - well I would simply open the question of whether the "executive" (slight pun) who is in charge, inside us, is always the one who we think it is. Our parents'/teachers' voices, or our own? Something is always being executed, even when we're not executing on our plan to do homework. The "fitting in, getting by" part of you made a plan to do homework, but the (I would argue) real part of you already realizes it's all silly bullshit & doesn't matter. The former is the one we reward with good grades & good jobs, but the latter is the one who's right.