Half a Mind to ..

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

Tag: cognitive load

  • When the Room Gets Too Loud (Insight 036)

    When the Room Gets Too Loud (Insight 036)

    There’s a particular kind of moment that I’ve come to recognise over the years. It doesn’t arrive with a bang. It creeps in.

    It tends to happen in the most ordinary of settings — a meal out, a gathering with half a dozen conversations flowing at once. Nothing unusual. Nothing dramatic.

    And yet, something begins to change.

    At first, I’m absolutely fine. I can follow the conversation, contribute, smile at the right moments, keep track of who is saying what. It all feels perfectly normal.

    Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the effort increases.

    (more…)
  • 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

    (more…)
  • A Simple Counting Strategy for Getting to Sleep (strategy 078)

    A Simple Counting Strategy for Getting to Sleep (strategy 078)

    For a long time, getting to sleep was less about tiredness and more about what my mind chose to do when the lights went out. Thoughts would arrive uninvited — sometimes anxious ones, sometimes creative ones. Ideas, phrases, connections. Perfectly reasonable thoughts, just turning up at the wrong time.

    What I needed was not silence, but less space for those thoughts.

    The basic method

    The core of the strategy is simple.

    I begin at 1000 and slowly subtract 3 each time:
    1000, 997, 994, 991, and so on.

    (more…)