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

by David Rock

“Your prefrontal cortex holds the contents of your mind at any one point,”

These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought.

The basal ganglia are four masses in the brain region driving routine activities that don’t require a lot of active mental attention.

Here’s a new perspective: each time you use your mental stage, allocate it to something important.

She would prioritize first, before any other attention-rich activity such as emailing. That’s because prioritizing

Picturing something you have not yet seen is going to take a lot of energy and effort. This partly explains why people spend more time thinking about problems (things they have seen) than solutions (things they have never seen). It explains why setting goals feels so hard (it’s hard to envision the future).

This tendency means scheduling the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.

This means not thinking when you don’t have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it’s truly essential that you do. Learning to say no to tasks that are not among your priorities is difficult but very helpful.

Another technique is not to think at all about a project until all the information is at hand. Don’t waste energy solving a problem you know you will have more information about later.

She gets an exciting idea about a new conference and quickly records these thoughts on an audio recorder she keeps in her car for this purpose. She knows she shouldn’t tire her brain trying to remember things.

Emily saves her energy for comparing, rather than holding the concepts on her stage. This small thing makes a big difference: all her processing power is available for considering the relationship between the items.

the stage works efficiently when you bring items onto it made up of elements embedded in long-term memory.

Relational complexity studies show over and again that the fewer variables you have to hold in mind, the more effective you are at making decisions.

We all often think about what’s easy to think about,

rather than what’s right to think about.

We now have three limitations: the stage takes a lot of energy to run, it can hold only a handful of actors at a time, and these actors can play only one scene at a time.

The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don’t divide your attention.

constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.

The surprise result of being always on is that not only do you get a negative effect on mental performance, but it also tends to increase the total number of emails you get. People notice you respond to issues quickly, so they send you more issues to respond to.

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. It takes less effort. If you are trying to focus on a subtle mental thread, allowing yourself to be distracted is like stopping pain to enjoy a mild pleasure: it’s too hard to resist! Blocking out external distractions altogether, especially if you get a lot of them, seems to be one of the best strategies for improving mental performance.

“Self-control is a limited resource,”

The insight experience is characterized by a lack of logical progression to the solution, but instead a sudden “knowing” regarding the answer.

Here’s a quick exercise to try right now to make the research more meaningful. Find some incoming data to focus your attention on, just for ten seconds.

If you did this exercise, perhaps you noticed several things, along with the incoming data you focused on. First, perhaps you noticed how hard it is to focus attention on one thing for ten seconds, which in itself

is interesting. During the ten seconds, perhaps you lost track of the data you were trying to focus on and started thinking instead (which is the most common response to this exercise). At that moment, when your attention switched away from the feeling of the seat and went to your lunch, your brain switched from your direct experience to your narrative network. If you then remembered the exercise and went back to paying attention to your chosen data stream, you reactivated the direct-experience circuitry.

Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned

by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.

Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.”

Automatic responses to dangers or rewards are thought of generally as emotions. Your ability to regulate your emotions instead of being at the mercy of them is central to being effective in a chaotic world.

increased adrenaline when you experience fear might make you feel focused and therefore more confident in your decisions, when your ability to make the best decisions has actually been reduced.

when people try to suppress the expression of an emotion, their memory of events is impaired, as if they are consciously focusing their attention elsewhere.

The brain craves certainty.

Choosing in some way to experience stress is less stressful than experiencing stress without a sense of choice or control.

Having an explanation for an experience reduces uncertainty and increases a perception of control.

One of the most common causes of tension between people is someone being fixed in his own worldview and not being able to see the world through another person’s eyes.

“All the brain can know it knows from inside itself.” If you recognize that all interpretations of the world are only that—interpretations your brain has made, and

ultimately just yours—then having a choice about which interpretation you might use at any moment makes more sense.

to create a “happy” life perhaps you should live a life with a good amount of novelty, create opportunities for unexpected rewards, and believe that things are always going to get slightly better.

Managing your expectations in any way requires, as with labeling and reappraisal, a strong director. When you can stop and notice your own mental state, you have the capacity to make choices about different ways of thinking. Great athletes observe the flow of their attention and make subtle changes to where their attention goes. Their director might notice expectations getting too aroused, and choose to dampen excitement, pushing the brain to stay focused on the moment instead.

people you don’t know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise.

there is only one experience in life that increases happiness over a long time. It’s not money, above a base survival amount. It’s not health, nor

is it marriage or having children. The one thing that makes people happy is the quality and quantity of their social connections.

“playing against yourself.”

Focus on yourself and improve yourself.

Think about what it feels like when you interact with someone who makes you notice what’s good about yourself (raising your status), who is clear with his expectations of you (increasing certainty), who lets you make decisions (increasing autonomy), who connects with you on a human level (increasing relatedness), and who treats you fairly. You feel calmer, happier, more confident, more connected, and smarter.

It seems that attention can quickly change the brain, if enough attention is paid to stimuli. It’s just that attention doesn’t tend to go easily to one place and stay there.

if you are planning on setting goals for other people, perhaps instead create a framework for them to set goals for themselves.