Hello again! I usually do a blog post every week, but I have this problem lately… Brain Fog. Perhaps you can relate?
I’m not a medical professional, so I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had Covid twice in the last few months, or because I’ve had 3 vaccines, or if it’s a combined effect. Regardless of the cause, the reality is that for months I have had to struggle to concentrate, and it seems to take enormous willpower to tackle new projects. Whether you do translation or other work, brain fog can be a real problem!
This week, I feel like I am finally getting back on track, just in time for the fall season. So I’d like to share with you 5 powerful ways that help me cope with brain fog. I hope some or all of them work for you as well!
- Clean off your desk. I know this sounds really basic, but if your desk is like mine, it acts as a magnet to attract papers, sticky notes, and miscellaneous items. My desk can get buried in less than 2 hours! I’ve learned to force myself to stop working and take a few minutes to put everything in its proper place so I can deal with one thing at a time. As I am removing things from my desk surface, I literally feel my stress level (and blood pressure) going down. When you clean off your desk, you create a blank slate for the ONE project you need to work on right now. And you shut down all those other things competing for your attention.
- Do a task triage. If you have fallen behind and deadlines are stacking up to the point that you feel overwhelmed (and maybe want to just give up), it’s time for a task triage. I do this for the coming week by writing down everything that MUST, SHOULD and COULD be done and jotting down beside each task approximately how long it will take. Then I figure out what is actually feasible based on the total number of hours required. MUST tasks usually have immediate deadlines; SHOULD tasks are long-term projects that I really need to make progress on; COULD tasks are often just great ideas that I might not have time to implement. When you triage your tasks, it relieves the pressure of feeling like everything has to be done right now. This allows you to focus on one thing at a time.
- Use routines and willpower to get started. Brain fog is debilitating and can make it really difficult to know what to do next. So I decide ahead of time what I will do in the mornings to best prepare myself for the day and to avoid using up my decision-making energy before starting work. For example, I never have to decide what to eat for breakfast: I always make a whole-food protein smoothie, and I take my vitamins at the same time. Then when it is time to start my work day, I draw on my willpower, which is still fresh, to immediately start the first project on my list for the day. Getting started takes the most effort; once I begin, momentum helps me keep going. When you follow a routine in the morning, you don’t have to think about what things you will do or what order you will do them in, so when you start your work day, you don’t have decision fatigue, and your willpower is high.
- Keep a work log. Throughout the day, I record how long I worked in each category/role. I log my time in quarters of an hour. For example, on Tuesday I spent: 5.5 hours on month-end accounting; 2.25 hours on translation work; and 0.25 hours in schedule planning. This information is really helpful when planning my weeks and months, and when figuring out how much time to allocate to various projects. When you keep a work log, sometimes you discover that you accomplished more than you thought! And it can bring to your attention that you are trying to do too many different types of work in a single day, which makes it difficult to concentrate.
- Give each day a theme. Instead of scattering tasks from my various roles into small bits of time throughout the week, I try to combine them into blocks. For example, for this fall season, I have four main categories of work and I am going to try to focus exclusively on one of these each day from Monday to Thursday. Friday will be my catch-up day when I deal with small tasks and unfinished items. When you give each day a theme, it eliminates a lot of “decision fatigue” – trying to decide what to do next. And this will help you fight back against brain fog. Even if you have as many as 10 roles/categories of work, you could allocate a half-day to each of them.
We can mitigate brain fog… in our translation work and in other projects. Try out these strategies today and see the difference they make. Most of all, cut yourself some slack!
You can’t work at your full potential or as fast as usual when your body is not at 100%, so be as forgiving and kind to yourself as you would be with someone else who has been sick.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
www.LearnTranslation.com
www.NonprofitTranslation.org
