Half a Mind to ..

Life after brain injury – one small victory at a time.

Category: strategy

  • The Three-Wheeled Lifeline(Strategy 032)

    The Three-Wheeled Lifeline(Strategy 032)

    An extra wheel sounds like a small change. For me, it gave back far more than cycling.

    My balance issues might have caused the end of my lifelong love of cycling. Instead, very shortly after the stroke, one of my sons suggested that I try a recumbent trike.

    I had been having problems with balance and proprioception – the sense of where my body and limbs are – for years before my stroke. After the stroke, weakness and fatigue added to the difficulty. An ordinary bicycle had become an unforgiving proposition. If I wobbled or stopped awkwardly, there was very little margin for error.

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  • Externalising Thought(Strategy 014)

    Externalising Thought(Strategy 014)

    I needed a different way to think

    After my brain injury, I gradually realised that some tasks were failing for a reason that had little to do with whether I understood them. I could understand a problem perfectly well and still lose my place in it. An interruption could displace what I had been holding in mind within seconds. Sometimes the limitation showed itself in much smaller ways: give me two pieces of spoken information in quick succession and the second could simply push the first one out.

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  • A Daily Email Dashboard (Strategy 159)

    A Daily Email Dashboard (Strategy 159)


    My recent posts about “the email beast” and “email labelling” (see below) have been paving the way for this post that shows how I use email labelling and filtering together to create bookmarked dashboards.

    Labelling brought order, but it did not change how I began the day. I was still opening my inbox and scanning.

    What shifted things for me was not a new label, but a saved search.



    Over time, I built search expressions that gather together the messages most likely to require my attention. Instead of starting with the whole inbox, I now start with that one view.

    What my most frequently used dashboard Includes



    • Unread messages in Primary
    • Unread Forum activity
    • Drafts I am working on
    • Items labelled Follow-Up
    • Items labelled Ongoing Topic
    • Items labelled Today

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