Your Brain at Work : Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

A researcher and consultant burrows deep inside the heads of one modern two-career couple to examine how each partner processes the workday—revealing how a more nuanced understanding of brain science can allow us to better organize, prioritize, recall, and sort our daily lives.

Emily and Paul are the parents of two young children, and professionals with different careers. Emily is the newly promoted vice president of marketing at a large corporation; Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their days are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm while overcoming distraction has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

In Your Brain at Work Dr. David Rock goes inside Emily and Paul's brains to see how they function as each attempts to sort, prioritize, organize, and act on the vast quantities of information they receive in one typical day. Dr. Rock is an expert on how the brain functions in a work setting. By analyzing what is going on in their heads, he offers solutions for improving decision making that Emily and Paul (and all of us) can use to survive and thrive in today's hyperbusy work environment—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

In Your Brain at Work, Dr. Rock explores issues such as:

• why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources
• why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
• how to maximize the chance of finding insights to solve seemingly insurmountable problems
• how to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible
• how to collaborate more effectively with others
• why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier
• how to be more effective at changing other people's behavior
• and much more.

Dr. David Rock coined the term ‘Neuroleadership’ and is the Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a cognitive science think tank and consultancy that has built a new science for leadership, learning and change. The Institute has helped nearly twenty million people in the last decade be more effective by understanding the brain, and has advised more than two thirds of the Fortune 100. He is the author of Coaching with the Brain in Mind, Quiet Leadership, and Your Brain at Work, and dozens of papers on the neuroscience of leadership. Originally Australian, he now lives in Miami Beach, Florida.