Build scaffolding before you need it
The professionals who weather foggy periods best are not the ones with the best memories — they are the ones who stopped relying on memory years ago. Externalise everything. A single running note per project, updated at the end of each day with three lines: what happened, what's next, who owes me something. A standing agenda you can glance at mid-conversation. A habit of typing the key decision into the chat or email immediately after a call, which doubles as a record for everyone else and quietly makes you look organised rather than forgetful.
Give yourself verbal scaffolding too. A handful of honest, unapologetic phrases will carry you through almost any meeting wobble: "Let me come back to that with the detail," "Can you give me the headline again, I want to get this right," "I'm going to write that down before it leaves me." None of these are confessions. Confident, competent people say them constantly. The only thing that makes them sound like weakness is saying them in an apologetic voice.
Protect your best hours ruthlessly
Almost everyone has a window of a few hours when their head is clearest, and almost everyone spends it on email. If your cognitive budget has shrunk, the allocation becomes urgent. Work out your window — for many people it is the first ninety minutes after they properly wake up — and put the thinking work there: the strategy document, the difficult conversation you need to prepare, the numbers you must actually understand.
Everything shallow gets pushed to the low-energy hours, where it belongs. Replying, filing, scheduling, tidying the shared drive. This is not a productivity hack so much as triage, and it works because it stops you spending your sharpest attention on tasks that any version of you could have done.
