As a coach, the fact that Henry couldn't show up as his best self was really bothering him.
With many open projects and various different types of clients, there was always something going on.

With his brain fog, Henry just couldn't do his best work.
He knew it and he felt he was letting down his clients in the process.

While we didn't do any work directly to deal with the brain fog, I had a feeling that by solving the root of the issue it would go away.
And go away it did.
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While you are doing any task, you (without even realizing it!) are using your 28 thinking skills.

When the thinking skills you need to use are strong, doing the task happens easily.
If the thinking skill you need to use is weak, doing the task will be a challenge.

The struggle that Henry had, came from a weak thinking skill of categorizations.

For Henry, a big part of brain fog was the many open tabs.
He had a coach tell him to write down all open projects, which created a list of 70 tasks he needed to close.
While he closed many of them out, it didn’t solve his issue as he still had more tasks and tasks were constantly getting added.

What he actually needed to do was change the way his brain organized his tasks.
He needed to improve his thinking skill of categorization.

You see, Henry was working with whatever was in front of him.
Client A needed a reply to an email, a connection to another coach, and a call scheduled.
Because Client A’s documents were open in front of him, he worked on all of Client A’s needs.
But Client B also needed a reply to an email.
And Client C needed a connection to the same third-party coach.

So, a smarter way to work, would not have been by client but by task.
He needed to get better at the skill of categorization so the organization could happen easily.
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I gave Henry a sheet full of animals and told him to put them into groups.
Whatever his groups were, they needed to be on the same parameter, level.

For example, if he was sorting them by color, every group was a different color and he couldn’t put two animals that looked like they should live together in the same group, because now he was categorizing it by color.
Henry grouped the animals based on what sort of environment they needed to survive, desert, forest, ocean, swamps, etc.

I then asked him to take the same animals and categorize them in a different way, using a different parameter.

This time, Henry categorized them based on their danger level.

And we did this a third time, this time he organized the animals based on how familiar they would be to children.
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Once categorizations happened easily, I asked Henry to look at all his tasks, or rather, parts of the tasks, and see which parts could go together.
Which tasks can you categorize together?
Responding to all emails at the same time?
Having all your calls two days a week instead of every day?

Can you categorize it even more by saying one day is team meetings and the other is client meetings?
This way you have all documents and supplies ready to go from meeting to meeting.


By doing categorization exercises, as soon as a task was placed in front of Henry, a client had a request or there was something he needed to get back to, he took the task and put it in the correct bucket or category.

This was true even for his home life.
As soon as an errand needed to get done, it got added to his errands list and he did these all together one day a week. Wednesday was errand day and he didn’t need to think more about the errand until Wednesday came around.

Since there weren’t so many tabs opening in his brain, his brain fog went away and he was able to come with full bandwidth to whatever was at the table.