中途半端

*caveat that im not an expert in anything but myself so maybe im using these terms differently than experts would. brain too tired to do that much googling rn but dont take anything im saying here as any kind of Professional Advice

for instance my job involves a lot of sending the same 6 kinds of emails over and over, so i've got my templates in a text expander (if you do similar kind of work and don't use one: get thee a text expander). when i've got some of these emails to send, even if i'm feeling too foggy to prepare a whole Communication i can at least fill out the parts of the template that are easiest (copying and pasting data from elsewhere, attaching files already prepared, etc) and come back to it later when i feel like i can complete the task. i do a Lot of this both in work and my day to day life and it really makes the difference between an unconquerable big task and a thing i managed to get done. even for non-form emails, i'll sometimes frontload a message i'm writing by simply jotting down the bullet points of what i need to cover, and when i come back to it later, it is SO much easier to draft a final email from an outline than try and disgorge it whole from my foggy brain

and the nice thing about this approach is sometimes in my frontloading i will develop the momentum to actually finish the email i'm writing. i rarely make this the goal, but it actually winds up happening pretty often, so it feels like a delightful surprise i can pat myself on the back for. you werent even trying to do the whole thing but you did!

another brain-saving strategy: scheduling emails 10 mins in advance. i rarely trust myself to get everything right the first time so i like to schedule an email, then look at it in my outbox before it sends bc it looks like a sent email and is easier to proof for things like "are these the correct attachments" and "did i forget to fill out part of this template" and "did i CC the correct email addresses". i catch errors more frequently than not and its pretty much my default practice now. this practice originated when i worked in-office in a place where ppl could and would simply go to your office to talk in person if they felt like it so any time i wanted to reply to a non-urgent email right away but didnt want them to know i was presently at my desk, i'd schedule it for like 30-60 mins out. sometimes to times after i was planning to leave the office. but its also massively useful in catching errors!