Your Brain at Work, Revised and Updated

A researcher and consultant delves deep into the minds of a modern two-career couple to examine how each partner processes the workday, revealing how a more nuanced understanding of the brain can help us 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, while Paul works from home or clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their days are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

In "Your Brain at Work," Dr. David Rock explores how Emily and Paul's brains function as they attempt to sort, prioritize, organize, and act on the vast quantities of information they receive in a typical day. Dr. Rock is an expert on brain function in a work setting. By analyzing what is happening in their minds, he offers solutions that Emily, Paul, and all of us can use to survive and thrive in today's hyperbusy work environment while still feeling energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

In "Your Brain at Work," Dr. Rock addresses issues such as why our brains feel so taxed and how to maximize our mental resources, why it's hard to focus and how to better manage distractions, how to maximize the chances of finding insights to solve seemingly insurmountable problems, how to keep your cool in any situation to make the best decisions possible, how to collaborate more effectively with others, why providing feedback is difficult and how to make it easier, how to be more effective at changing other people's behavior, and much more.