You’re Not Bad at Productivity—You’re Planning for a Reality You’re Not In

If your body or mind limits your ability to take action on your priorities, this video is for you.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

Hi, I'm Cas Winter. I'm a productivity and self care expert for those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled. Inside my program, The Action Navigator, I help people just like you learn how to spend their precious time and energy in the way they want and need, all while being kind to themselves and caring for themselves.

The reason why I'm talking about this this week is because last week I encountered a problem that I have encountered over and over and over and over again. And I'm certain that a lot of you can relate. I had my list of tasks or projects for the week. I prioritized them. I used the prioritizing grid that I talked about in this video to get like the priority order, like number one, most priority, number two, second priority, so on and so forth.

In theory, if one was not disabled physically and or mentally in any way, one could do those tasks in order of priority. But that was not my reality last week. It is really easy under these circumstances to think that you, your capacity and your ability is the problem. It becomes really easy to beat yourself up, to feel a lot of shame. When you find yourself not able to complete things,

it's important to shift away from blame and shame and toward radical acceptance so we can make more helpful decisions about how we spend our time and energy. I want to talk about how this problem is indicative of a cycle that I see over and over and over again and one that I myself have fallen into and continue to fall into if I don't take deliberate steps to counter it.

And this is a cycle that when left unchecked and just circled through over and over and over again contributes to, if not outright leads to burnout. So I call this the broken compass. And yes, that means there is a good compass. We'll get there. Here's the compass. If you look at it, it has two directions. You can either go clockwise or counterclockwise. And it all starts up at the top with high expectations.

And that's often wrapped up in what we are told is our "potential" (in scare-quotes). If you go clockwise to the right, you have the push yourself category of things that tend to take you into fight or flight or you are in fight or flight and therefore you are pushing yourself. Pushing yourself is mindsets and actions that take us beyond our capacity and ability and take us into debt in one or more of our three gas tanks, physical gas tank, cognitive gas tank, emotional gas tank.

And then because by definition, we are pushing ourselves beyond our limits. We are going to fail and or make mistakes. It is inevitable. At best, we feel like we're not enough. And at worst, I don't want to trigger anyone, so I'm not going to explicitly describe those states of mind at this point in time. And, and then that just takes you straight back up. It's like, oh, you failed or you've made mistakes in some way, shape or form, you have not done the thing that you wanted to do or needed to do and the thing still needs to get done or it needs to get done better.

Yeah. So you just go right back up to high expectations. But maybe this time you're like, okay, I can't, I can't push myself this time. So I'm going to go left, I'm going to go counterclockwise around the cycle. And you go into the mindfulness trap, either explicitly or which creates fawn or freeze or you're in faun or freeze. And that makes you want to do mindfulness. And there are lots of good things in this category of action.

Mindfulness in and of itself is a morally neutral thing. That being said, pushing yourself in and of itself is a morally neutral thing when done in a healthy way. Right. The issue is when the start of this cycle at the top of this compass is high expectations or unsafe expectations, you're acting from some form of denying reality. We're going to get to that more. But basically, either way, when you start with unsafe high expectations, either side of this compass, you go down, you're going to fail, you're going to make mistakes, it's going to suck and it's going to not feel good.

If you don't break yourself out of this cycle, you're just gonna keep on going. The reason I put the quote, everyone has the same 24 hours in a day on the left hand side of this compass is because that is one of the quickest ways to describe toxic productivity, ableism, hustle culture, which is something that harms not just people who are disabled, it harms everyone. We do not all have the same 24 hours in a day, end of sentence.

The root at this toxic cycle is the high expectations, the unsafe expectations coming from your potential. Your need to excel, not just succeed, your need to be perfect, not just to get it done, to get it done and it's fine and it doesn't have to be perfect. It all stems from that. I mentioned before, that that is a form of denying reality. While there is a cycle of setting a high expectation of yourself and pushing yourself to achieve it.

And it is technically possible and plausible to do that in a healthy way. We have to say no to a bunch of stuff in order to make room in our lives to push ourselves in a certain context of our lives. We cannot give 100% in 100% of the contexts that we have in our lives. That is not possible, that is not feasible, that is not plausible. My point being that the thing to focus on is the start of the cycle, that first domino.

When we change that first key domino in a meaningfully powerful way, the rest of the dominoes that fall over contribute to our progress and our self care in a powerful way. I'm going to introduce you to what I call the Navigator's Compass and this is the framework that I have been developing explicitly for the past few years, but is a refinement of what I have been coaching since I started this business back in 2020.

If you have watched my original Butt in Chair Time webinar (scroll to the bottom of the page to access) that I did way back in the day and I'm so glad so many of you still get benefit from that and I still am proud of and stand by that framework. This Navigator's Compass is that taken to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next level in a more streamlined but explicit way. Here it is, the Navigator's Compass.

The first thing I want to point out to you is the quote, this time on the left hand side of the compass which reads "clarity comes from curious experimentation, not thought". This is my own personal adjustment to the famous quote. "Clarity comes from action, not not thought". Which is all fine and good, if you are not disabled in any way, shape or form and you do not struggle to take action.

If you don't struggle to take action, then this quote makes perfect sense. It's like, oh yeah, I have to do stuff in order to understand what I like, what I don't like, what I want, what I don't want, what my dreams are, what my dreams aren't, yada yada yada. Because you don't struggle to take action. But if you are here, you probably struggle a lot to take action for a lot of different reasons.

And that's okay. So I have shifted the quote to say clarity comes from curious experimentation, not thought. Because that concept of curious experimentation tends to help dismantle the wall of awful that How to ADHD talks about in a meaningfully potent way. The first domino in this compass is the top center and it is called assess. And the tool that we use to assess is Radical acceptance, which is a term that has been thrown around a lot in the mindfulness and the woo woo peripheries of mindfulness areas here on the interwebs.

And one of the things that has always bothered me as an individual seeking help. People don't break things down in a way that A makes sense or B is actionable. Radical acceptance is Radical acceptance is. "How does one do Radical acceptance?" was something that I asked a lot back in the day. I have answered that question for myself and for you. So remember when I said earlier that the broken compass starts with some form of denying reality that's at the root of high unsafe expectations?

Radical acceptance is based on honoring reality. So let's look at this flowchart I made a few years back that I still love. If you deny and or resist reality in any way, shape or form, you're taken down the right side of this float chart. Examples of denying or resisting reality are toxic positivity, gaslighting, wishful thinking, whatever sort of "potential" (in scare quotes) that has been projected onto you since you were a child.

Ableism is another big one in flashing neon lights. When you make decisions based on resisting or denying reality, you get expectations that are too high if not impossible. You make things harder than they have to be. And this possibly goes as far as self sabotage or even self harm. Those are the dominoes that get knocked over when you start with denying or resisting reality. On the other side of that is radical acceptance.

And that, all that means is honoring what reality is for you right now and in the time window that applies to whatever set of decisions or plans you're trying to make. Radical acceptance is the ability to acknowledge the reality of your current circumstances, capacities, abilities and feelings and make choices from there instead of making choices from a place of resisting or denying reality. When you knock over the first domino of radical acceptance and then you make plans and choices from there, you are already miles ahead of everybody else.

It results in self compassion, self care, accommodations, safe expectations and compromises. That is step one. That is your first domino. And if that's all you work on for the year of 2026, I bet that'll make a huge difference for you. Let's go back to the original topic of this video and that's what? What do you do when your ability or capacity, or both, does not allow you to accomplish your priorities right?

The first one is to figure out which compass you've been operating under. Have you been setting high unachievable expectations willy nilly with disregards to the reality of your life and capacity and ability, or have you been trying really hard to honor your capacity and ability and have still been struggling? Basically, which domino have you been knocking over first? Have you been doing the one on the broken compass or the one on the healthier Navigator's Compass?

If you've been operating from the broken compass, your first step is is to start practicing radical acceptance and making decisions from there. If you have already been practicing radical acceptance and been trying to make decisions from there, like me, I've been doing this for ages. But we are not all knowing. Even if you do your best due diligence to uncover the iceberg that is your reality to make decisions from there, you're not going to be all knowing and you're going to make mistakes and you're going to expect too much of yourself sometimes, and that's okay.

The solution then is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, to try to start fresh, to assume everything you've been doing is wrong, it doesn't work. It's to offer yourself the grace to iterate. You now know better so you can do better. You're not going to become perfect, but you can make a slightly better decision this week than you did last week in order to move forward.

Once you start knocking over the more compassionate first domino, you'll find yourself having a different relationship with the Word, the Experience of Failure as someone who was abused as a child for failing even in the most minor of ways, I still personally have a long ways to go to improving my relationship with the word and experience of failure. But when I look back just a few years, let alone 10, let alone 20, I have come so so far.

It is true that success comes on the other side of failure and a lot of failure. The cycle is not do then succeed. The cycle is try fail, try fail, try fail. And eventually, when you don't give up, you will succeed. Failure is part of the process and there's nothing wrong with you or broken about you because you experience failure. While your limited ability and capacity is a burden on you, it doesn't make you a burden.

You are carrying those burdens. The problem is more accurately twofold. The information from which you are basing your decisions is inaccurate either because you have been actively resisting or denying reality, or you've been doing your best to radically accept your reality. And just because you are not all knowing, you didn't know everything. Your information was incomplete. Hi, when you go in, any decision making you do based on that inaccurate information is going to be flawed.

It's just this whole set of dominoes that gets knocked over. That is the issue. The solution, while yes includes some mindset reframing, the solution is to knock over a better first domino and engaging in radical acceptance and then making decisions from there. You have plenty of room. You're tiny. So what I discovered after last week is that I didn't have all the information and therefore was not able to break down my priorities into small enough actionable steps that I could take action and make meaningful progress on them.

That's all. Was my limited capacity and ability a problem? Technically, yes. But that doesn't mean I'm a problem. It means I didn't have the information I needed to make more accommodating planning decisions for myself. It means I didn't have the information I needed to make more accommodating planning decisions for myself. Like I said in my last video, doing this work at best feels disingenuous right now and at worst feels like what's the point?

In the face of, current events, people of color, particularly black and indigenous Native Americans, have been trying to tell us. And by us, I mean the most privileged, particularly white individuals. Like they've been trying to tell us for the entire life of the United States. What we are now seeing happen to white women and white men in this country has been happening to black and indigenous and people of color for the entire life of the United States.

The identity that intersects most highly with those identities is disability. I highly recommend you go find and follow Imani Barbarin and learn about something called manufactured consent. Long story short, it is the step by step process which the government and those in power have used to boil the frogs, as it were. And I just want to make it abundantly clear what my stance is. Abolish ICE. ICE needs to be abolished, dismantled, completely eradicated.

Defunding it is not enough and giving them more money to train them better. That's awful. That's awful. No, we're not doing that. Abolish ICE. Like I said last time, I'm not giving up and I invite you to join me. The reason why I have not completely packed up shop is because, disabled people need and deserve help and support. Everything from just surviving and living your life all the way to fighting fascism involves the ability to proactively spend your time and energy the way you want and need to.

And that is what I am able to help people do. So I will keep doing it. And if you use what you learned today to help you take direct action against fascism and authoritarianism, awesome. High five I'm so proud of you. And if you take what you learned today simply to not give up, if that's all you've got, if that's all I helped you do, we're in this together.

And I am so proud of you for not giving up. I believe in a better future. I believe in you. I believe in us. See you next time.