Your executive functioning
Your Crew: Understanding how to plan, prioritise, organise, remember and respond to what life asks of you.
Your crew represents the inner and outer supports that help you manage the practical demands of life. The systems, cues, reminders, routines, people, tools and compassionate strategies that help you move from intention into action.
This is not about forcing yourself to become more disciplined, efficient or “on top of everything.” It is about understanding how your brain works, what makes action possible, and what kind of crew you need around you so life feels less like a constant emergency.
A kinder way to understand executive functioning
You are not lazy, broken or failing.
Executive functioning includes the skills that help you start tasks, switch tasks, plan ahead, hold information in mind, organise steps, manage time, remember what matters and respond to the demands around you.
For ADHD, Autistic, AuDHD and highly sensitive people, these skills can fluctuate depending on nervous system state, interest, energy, sensory load, emotion, pressure and context.
When executive functioning is hard, the answer is rarely more shame. The answer is usually better understanding, more supportive systems and strategies that work with your real brain rather than against it.
Why your crew matters
You were never meant to run the whole ship alone.
When life asks a lot of you, it can feel as though every role falls to one exhausted part of yourself: the planner, the organiser, the rememberer, the motivator, the decision-maker and the person who has to hold everything together.
Your crew is a reminder that support can be shared. Some of that crew may be external — people, calendars, prompts, body doubling, templates or practical help. Some may be internal — strengths, values, rhythms, sensory awareness, self-compassion and nervous-system support.
The aim is not to become perfectly organised. The aim is to build enough support around you that the next step becomes more visible, more possible and less lonely.
PINCH & INCUP
Motivation often needs the right conditions.
Many ADHD people recognise that action becomes easier when there is enough interest, urgency, novelty, challenge or purpose. These are often described through frameworks such as INCUP and PINCH.
These ideas can help you understand why some tasks feel impossible until the last minute, why boring-but-important things can feel physically hard to begin, and why the right kind of stimulation or meaning can suddenly make action accessible.
INCUP
Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency and Passion can create the conditions that make motivation, focus and action more available.
PINCH
Play, Interest, Novelty, Competition and Hurry can help explain why some brains need stimulation, immediacy or aliveness before a task becomes doable.
Planning, prioritising and organising
Executive functioning support needs to feel usable in real life.
Traditional productivity advice often assumes a steady nervous system, predictable energy, linear time and a brain that can simply “just do the thing.” That advice can leave neurodivergent people feeling worse when it does not work.
WayPower approaches executive functioning through compassion, context and experimentation. What helps you start? What helps you return? What helps you remember? What reduces friction? What makes the next step feel small enough, meaningful enough or supported enough?
Instead of asking, “Why can’t I do this?” we can ask, “What conditions would make this more possible?”
This work can help you explore
The supports that help your life move.
Plan
Break ideas, responsibilities and projects into steps that are clear enough to begin.
Prioritise
Work out what matters now, what can wait, and what is only pretending to be urgent.
Organise
Create external structures, cues and rhythms that reduce the need to hold everything in your head.
Remember
Use reminders, prompts and visible systems that support memory without relying on shame or pressure.
Start
Understand what makes initiation easier, including interest, urgency, novelty, challenge and support.
Respond
Build more flexible ways to respond to life without being pulled into constant reactivity.
Read the blog
Want to understand PINCH and INCUP more deeply?
Read my introduction to PINCH and INCUP for ADHD executive functioning. It explores why motivation is often less about willpower and more about creating the right conditions for action with WayPower.
This is a useful next step if you want a clearer, kinder way to understand why some tasks feel blocked, why pressure sometimes works but costs too much, and how to build supports that feel more sustainable.
Self-Worth, Confidence & Self-Esteem
Your deck
The currents and tides of time
The Sea
Why WayPower?
I set up Positively ADHD because I believe in a different way forward.
People with ADHD have so many gifts and incredible ways of thinking which can make a huge contribution to the world. Yet so much nuance is lost in the deficit-based, medical model which sees ADHD as a list of “symptoms” that need to be “treated”.
Many of us who were late-diagnosed or have self-diagnosed, have spent our whole lives in survival mode, because we did not know that our brains and nervous systems were different. We may have spent many years believing we were broken and have probably struggled with periods of depression, anxiety and burnout.
Whilst I don’t underestimate the difficulties that ADHD can cause, I also know that when we feel creative, hopeful, and connected to our purpose, anything is possible for us and our amazing minds.
Support for sensitive and neurodivergent people navigating life, work and everything in between.