Half a Mind to ..

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

Tag: marginal gains

  • 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…)
  • Marginal gains (insight 021)

    Marginal gains (insight 021)

    Sir Dave Brailsford, the performance director who transformed British cycling, built his approach around the idea of “marginal gains” — the belief that improving many small things by just one percent can combine to create a dramatic overall improvement. The same principle applies here. My blog isn’t about grand, sweeping solutions, but about small, workable strategies for coping with the daily realities of life after brain injury. Each post offers a modest idea — perhaps trivial on its own — yet together they can make life that little bit easier, steadier, and more manageable over time.