Your Brain at Work

Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

by David Rock

Number of pages: 304

Publisher: Harper Business

BBB Library: Psychology and Strengths, Personal Success

ISBN: 9780061771293



About the Author

Rock is a consultant and leadership coach who advises corporations around the world. The author of Coaching with the Brain in Mind, Quiet Leadership, and Personal Best, he is the CEO of Results Coaching Systems, a leading global consulting and coaching organization.

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Editorial Review

No matter what you do and what you aim for, you can always improve your performance, be more focused and productive, stay cool under pressure, reduce the length of meetings, and tackle the hardest challenge of all: influencing other people. You can also be a better parent and partner, perhaps even live longer. You can achieve all of that by understanding the role of your brain at work and discovering recent breakthroughs in neuroscience.

Book Reviews

“Rock keeps your attention throughout by implementing a narrative conceit involving two people, Paul and Emily, in before-and-after scenarios. Paul and Emily make poor decisions at first, and then later, when they understand better how the brain works, they make better decisions and find more success in the mock situations.”

“Your Brain At Work, by David Rock, helps us understand these strengths and weaknesses and how to take advantage of our brain." Reason for Success

"If you’ve ever wondered how your brain works…literally…,Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Longis a must read. This book, by David Rock, takes you into the physical workings of the brain in a way that anyone will understand." WebPsychology

"if you want to improve your performance in areas such as stress, work life balance, learning new skills, breaking bad habits, achieving goals, motivating others, improving your memory & having great meetings and you prefer an approach that seems more rooted in logic, this will be worth a read." trainingzone

"the book explains a lot about how you react to change, why it’s hard and why introspection on how you react is important. By the act of reading the book, you are performing some of that work you need to facilitate change within yourself."Enigmatic Events

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Wisdom to Share

Do prioritizing when you are fresh and energized.

Prioritizing involves imaging and then moving around concepts of which you have no direct experience.

Picturing something you have not yet seen is going to take a lot of effort and energy.

The idea is to get concepts out of your mind and into the world and to save the stage for the most important functions. Minimize energy usage to maximize performance.

To be most effective, schedule your most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.

Making a tough decision might take thirty seconds when you are fresh and be impossible when you are not.

It’s helpful to become aware of your own mental energy needs and schedule accordingly.

Give your brain a rest when you can by mixing things up.

Learning to say no to tasks that are not among your priorities is difficult but very helpful.

Another technique for thinking less about unnecessary tasks is to delegate well

Don’t waste energy solving a problem you know you will have more information about later.

The mental capacity of your working memory is smaller than you might expect. With so little space available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and make mistakes.

If you have to hold more information in mind, try to limit ideas to three or four at once.

Constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test.

People tend to hold several focuses at once and switch rapidly between them.

Whenever you multitask accuracy goes down.

Distractions are not just frustrating, they can be exhausting.

Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall and memorize.

One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is simple: switch off all communication devices during any thinking work.

Your brain prefers to focus on things right in front of you.

A lot of the distractions we all deal with are internal. The mind likes to wander and strange thoughts pop into awareness at odd moments.

You don’t have much ability to intervene in the signals sent out by your brain. But you have the ability to choose whether to act on an impulse or not.

Staying focused requires learning not just to switch off your cell phone, the harder part is learning to inhibit impulses as they arise.

Change is hard, and facilitating change in others is even harder.

Books by the same Author

Businesses everywhere face this kind of problem: success isn’t possible without changing the day-to-day behavior of people throughout the company. But changing behavior is hard, even for individuals, and even when new habits can mean the difference between life and death. So what about changing the way a whole organization behaves?
The Neuroscience of Leadership

Businesses everywhere face this kind of problem: success isn’t possible without changing the day-to-day behavior of people throughout the company. But changing behavior is hard, even for individuals, and even when new habits can mean the difference between life and death. So what about changing the way a whole organization behaves?