Have you ever had a morning where a wave of anxiety hits you as you turn on your computer because you find a deluge of emails to go through?
Many of them require responses yet you’ve got back-to-back meetings and a critical deliverable due by day’s end. Not knowing what to tackle first, you dive right in and jump from one thing to the next and after some time has passed you realize you haven’t gotten anything of value done and you’re exhausted.
If this sounds familiar and you want to find a better way to work, I highly recommend the book Your Brain at Work by Dr. David Rock. Rock is cofounder and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute and an expert on how the brain functions.
In this easy-reading book, he helps us understand how the brain functions at work and how we can actually direct it to be more productive and to work smarter. Rock says the brain is very powerful yet it is also a limited resource with limited energy - it can only hold a certain amount of information and uses up a lot of energy when doing specific tasks such as innovating, remembering, organizing and prioritizing. From his years of research, he has created a number of strategies that actually direct the brain to stay focused and operate more effectively.
The book is written as a story, following the lives of working couple Emily and Paul, both struggling to manage their overwhelming workloads and daily distractions. Rock addresses their ineffective ways of working and offers helpful strategies on how they can work smarter.
I particularly like Rock’s “chunking” method which he uses to break down and simplify complex information and projects. Rock says the brain naturally wants to group complex information into chunks which allows us to give it specific directions on what to do when. When Paul is faced with the daunting task of writing an important business proposal in only one hour, he doesn’t know what to do first and is worried he’ll get caught up in the details, which would keep him from getting it done. To make his hour productive, Rock suggests Paul use chunking, which starts with Paul figuring out what he most needs to achieve in the hour he has.
You can read all of Paul’s story and how he directed his brain and energy to get more done faster in the book. What I want you to take away from this is that the brain is a tool that wants to help us yet has a specific way of functioning. Once you learn this, and read the useful techniques presented by Dr Rock, you will be able to work smarter and do away with those feelings of anxiety I mentioned earlier.