• Your Brain at Work

  • Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
  • By: David Rock
  • Narrated by: Bob Walter
  • Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (3,875 ratings)

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Your Brain at Work  By  cover art

Your Brain at Work

By: David Rock
Narrated by: Bob Walter
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Publisher's summary

Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

In this book, we travel inside Emily's and Paul's brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they're presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it, and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they're in good hands: David Rock knows how the brain works - and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. Rock shows how it's possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the listener, not only to survive in today's overwhelming work environment but succeed in it - and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

Your Brain at Work 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 your chance of finding insights that can 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
©2009 David Rock (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers

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Interesting Insights into the Brain

I wrote a post detailing my review of Your Brain at Work. I'm posting it here for reading convenience:

Rock’s main argument is that by better understanding your brain, you can align the way you work with your brain’s tendencies, patterns, and instincts to be more productive and successful.

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.

I found Rock’s book particularly interesting, not only for the helpful productivity tips but also because of the insights into the brain.

The Stage Metaphor

To explain how the brain works, Rock compares the brain to a stage. The stage can only accommodate so many actors before the play starts to get chaotic. When we multitask, we place more actors on our stage, and if we have too many actors, we become overloaded. The actors bump into each other and can’t move about in graceful harmony. It’s chaos. This translates into stress and frustration.

Rock says our brain can’t multitask when the tasks involve the prefrontal cortex — an area of the brain that requires high attention and focus. Instead, we only task-switch between multiple activities. Only when one activity is so familiar and routine that our basal ganglia can handle it almost unconsciously can we perform multiple tasks at once.

For example, if you’re used to driving the same route to work, it’s not difficult to drive that familiar route while listening to an audio book that requires a moderate level of concentration. In this case, you can multitask because your prefrontal cortex handles the audio listening while your basal ganglia handles the driving. However, if you were driving in downtown Manhattan for the first time — an act requiring a high degree of concentration and alertness — there’s no way you could successfully perform two prefrontal cortex tasks with equal competence.

In fact, Rock cites studies showing that our IQ dramatically falls when we attempt to multi-task, such as switching between an iPhone and a meeting. Studies show that a Harvard-level educated person can be reduced to a third-grade equivalent when multi-tasking.

Constant interruptions that compel us to continue switching tasks removes our chance at productivity. Important tasks that require deep immersion in thought are compromised when we fail to focus with enough uninterrupted study to reach a “continuous flow state,” as it’s sometimes called.

When actors on our stage keep coming and going, appearing and disappearing, and when the play keeps changing scripts and scenes, the brain can’t be productive. We need an uninterrupted focus with just a few actors on stage.

The first tip for productivity, then, is to allow for longer periods of uninterrupted thought and focus as you tackle high priority problems. Turn off the distractions and allow yourself to engage for a while with a problem. Identify your priority for the day early in the morning, and carve out time to tackle it. Avoid social media, meetings, phone calls, and other distractions that take you away from a state of focus.

The Science of Insight

Beyond encouraging single tasking, Rock also touches on the neuroscience of insight. He says when you get stuck on a problem, it’s helpful to step back and look inward for a few moments. He says our brain has a unique ability to enter states of self-awareness, or mindfulness, where our “director,” as he calls it, observes itself in action.

This is the metacognitive ability we have to step outside of our thought processes and observe ourselves thinking, to see ourselves acting in the moment almost as if we were another person. Philosophers have reflected on this director in the mind for centuries, he says.

Scientists who study insight find that insights come most frequently when people look inward with a quiet contemplation. To arrive at insights, he encourages a model called ARIA: Attention, Reflection, Insight, and Action. When faced with a problem, narrow your attention by removing extraneous actors from the stage and focusing inward. Then reflect, perhaps looking at the issue from different perspectives. More often than not, insights will come.

If they don’t, Rock mentions a few other strategies for insights as well. If you’re stuck at an impasse, give yourself a break. It’s easy for the brain to get stuck continuing down the same path over and over. You need to rest and shift your attention for a while to something else, and then return to the problem with a fresh perspective later. You’ll find you’re no longer stuck in the same rut as before, and you may see the solution much more clearly and easily.

He also recommends simplifying complex problems into smaller parts. Instead of trying to wrap your mind around a problem with multiple stages, various components, workflows, and related issues, chunk the issue into simpler parts that you can tackle individually.

Finally, he recommends incorporating more visuals to tackle the problems. Visuals make it easier to process complex information. Drawing pictures of the problem, or incorporating some other visual stimuli to think and interact with the problem may lead you to insights more quickly.

SCARF Model

In the second half of the book, Rock dives into five key attributes the brain cares deeply about: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness, or SCARF for short. Our brain treats these attributes almost as intensely as survival instincts. When we interact with others, we will have more success by remembering to account for these attributes.

For example, with fairness, studies have shown that when two people are to split $10, if one person decides to take $7 and give the other $3, the person getting the smaller amount will feel such an incredible unfairness, he or she often will choose for no one to receive money at all rather than be slighted with the lesser amount. The sense of fairness is at times stronger than the desire for reward.

Autonomy is another huge trait the brain gravitates toward. In leadership roles, it’s much better to help people find solutions themselves rather than force others to accept solutions and decisions you make for them. We love to have independence in our work, and when it’s taken away and we are compelled toward specific ends, we reject it fiercely.

With status, slight another person in front of others, giving new projects to someone with little experience instead of to a senior-level team member, and this shift in status can demotivate. The same strategy works at home in managing children. The older children enjoy a higher level status, and when you take that status away, or put the older child on equal ground with the younger, it sends the older child into rebellion for the loss of status.

What does relatedness mean? People respond better when you try to relate to their frustrations, challenges, and experiences. Relating to another person can help build trusting, solid relationships, which will help you have more successful interactions.

Certainty is also a state the brain craves. Kids love to have routines, because routines encourage a world of certainty. People don’t like uncertain futures. Will you be able to meet the project deadline? Will the company go under? Uncertainty breeds fear and a sense of doubt.

Takeaways

Your Brain at Work has a lot of helpful ideas to increase productivity. Here are a few of my takeaways:

* Identify your priority at the start of your work day.

* Focus on a single task for a solid duration of time and avoid distractions.

* If you find yourself feeling overloaded, remove some of the actors on your stage.

* When you need insight to solve a problem, change your attention and heighten your reflection, looking inward with mindfulness.

* If you still need insight, take breaks to change your perspective, chunk complex problems into smaller parts, and use visuals such as drawing.

* Remember the importance of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness when interacting with people. If something goes wrong, analyze the situation based on these elements.

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449 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

TERRIBLE LISTEN

This book is a terrible listen. The narrator emphasises every 4-6 syllables for no reason. It is DIFF-icult to FOL-low a-LONG when the NAR-rator TALKS like THIS for the en-TI-re BOOK. If im-POR-tant THOU-ghts were EM-phasised, or if he RE-ad it like a NOR-mal PER-son, I think I would have en-JOY-ed it much MO-re.

Very, very unfortunate. I also feel like the analogy of the mind being a stage, and the audience members are the pieces of your memory, to be a bit of a stretch and difficult to follow.

I've listened to several other books from Audible and have enjoyed them very much - Getting Things Done, Making Things Stick, The Tipping Point - but this book was just such a difficult listen that I have had a hard time finishing it, let alone trying to extract any usable information from it.

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259 people found this helpful

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Get "Spark" Instead

As many other reviewers have said, the reader is just far too monotone and boring. In addition, the content is very basic - If you know anything about performance psychology at all (if you know what a mnemonic is) then you probably won't get much from this book.

I'd recommend getting "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" instead. Much better book on a similar subject.

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119 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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Get it! Both the book... and the concepts in it

This is not one of those Malcolm Gladwell'ish books that pretend to be clever, yet caters to the airport book buying crowd who needs something that digests easily, like fast food calories. No, this book actually has some very interesting unique content regarding focus and concentration, and it challenges some common concepts within that area. If you're interested in productivity and the brain: Get it!

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117 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

An amazing insight to the brain

I found this book amazing. Being a student of leadership and personal effectiveness, this really complemented other books with a more biological viewpoint. The authors excellence lies in his ability to put scientific discoveries into a useful framework and explain them through easy-to-grasp-metaphors and every-day-life-examples. The reading is okay, although a few puns are lost to a certain degree of roboticness. Highly highly recommended!

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68 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

hard to listen to

As an earlier reviewer wrote, the content might be good, but it's really hard to overlook the speaker. Very hard to listen to. Would not recommend as audiobook.

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60 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Great book!

I really enjoy how "Your Brain at Work" uses multiple studies of the brain in very realistic situations (I love brain studies). Each of the example situations are connected throughout the book and you actually begin to form a bond with the characters used in the situations. First you are introduced to a typical situation that in which the characters act "normally" but with a not so great outcome. Then the situation is repeated and the main characters utilize what has been discussed in the chapter to change the outcome of the situation. You actually feel yourself getting smarter as your read the book. Eventually you yourself begin to think your way out of the situations being presented. This book is a classic already!

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47 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Absolutely Superb!

This is the best thing I've "read" in over a year.

In my dispute resolution coaching practice, I had to intuitively figure a lot of this out. It's not only lovely to see that science validates my intuitive findings (rewarding my certainty neurons extensively), but it's especially exciting to me to find language and concepts I can now use with clients who need the know-how of science to "prove" things to them before they will try anything.

My only disappointment is that Audible didn't have David Rock's book for coaches available to download once I finished this one.

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38 people found this helpful

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Formatted for the layman to understand and apply

I have made attempts to read several "how your brain works" books but always found myself drifting into thought instead of focusing on the message. The narrators are usually monotone and the terminology is way over my head. This book is different. The narration is better, the way the David Rock lays out the message is brilliant, and I often found myself in those "Ah Ha!" moments only wanting to listen more intently. I have not stopped recommending this book to everyone I know and cannot emphasize enough how much this book can change your life by you not having to do any huge lifestyle changes. I plan on listening to this book another five times minimum!

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Hard "read", worth the time, at double speed

I will recommend this audiobook with the caveat that because the situations are done twice, the wrong way then the right way, I had to increase the speed too 2.0 to keep my interest.

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22 people found this helpful