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

Introduction

An avalanche of emails.

An impossible number of text messages.

Dozens of alerts from Facebook, LinkedIn, and your CRM.

A meeting schedule that leaves you exhausted by 11:00 a.m.

Ever more change and uncertainty as your job changes monthly.

The occasional win just to keep you going.

If this sounds like your average day at work, you’ve picked up the right book.

This book will help you be more focused and productive, work smarter, stay cool under pressure, reduce the length of meetings, and even tackle the hardest challenge of all: influencing other people. Along the way it may help you be a better parent and partner, and perhaps even live longer. It will even make coffee for you. Okay, maybe not that last bit, but everything else I mean quite seriously.

This book will transform your performance at work by letting you in on recent and important discoveries about the human brain. You’ll have the chance to get more focused and productive by understanding your own brain at work—at work. It’s only through knowing your brain that you can change it. (How your brain can change by understanding itself is something you will learn about here, too.)

I know a lot about how brains get easily overwhelmed, so I have no intention of drowning you in complicated science here. Instead, in this book you’ll get to know your brain in a way that brains like: by reading a story. This story involves two characters, Emily and Paul, as they experience a set of challenges over a single day at work. As you watch Emily and Paul go through their day, some of the smartest neuroscientists in the world will explain why they struggle with their email, schedules, and colleagues. Even better, you will also get to see what Emily and Paul might have done differently if they’d understood their brains better.

Before I explain how this book is organized, let me give you a little background as to how this all came about. I help organizations such as BlackRock, IBM, and Microsoft improve their performance. Over the course of a decade of this work, I’ve discovered, somewhat by accident, that teaching people managers and employees about their brains made a big difference to their performance, and often to their lives, too. When I couldn’t find a book that explained the most useful discoveries about the brain in simple language for people at work, I decided to write one.

This book took three years to put together initially, though I had been developing parts of it for several years longer. It is based on interviews with thirty leading neuroscientists from the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, and it draws from more than three hundred research papers based on thousands of brain and psychological studies done over recent years. While writing this book, I had a scientific mentor help me wade through the research, neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz. I also convened three summits about the brain in the workplace: in Italy, Australia, and the United States. Out of those summits, I helped create an academic journal and gave hundreds of lectures and workshops across the globe. Since the first edition of this book came out, I have now run fourteen international summits and written or edited over fifty papers for academic journals, helping to define a whole field of study called NeuroLeadership. The ideas in this book emerged out of a combination of all these activities.

Enough about me. Let’s explore how the book is organized. I wanted this book to be useful to people. That’s tricky when you’re dealing with the most complex thing in the known universe, the human brain. After several attempts to explain the brain in different ways, I decided to structure this book like a play.

The play has four acts. The first two acts are about your own brain. The second two acts focus on interacting with other people’s brains. There is also an intermission, which explores some of the deeper themes emerging out of the story.

Act 1 is called Problems and Decisions, and involves the fundamentals of thinking. Act 2, Stay Cool Under Pressure, explores emotions and motivations and the impact of these on thinking. Act 3, Collaborate with Others, introduces research on how we might all get along better. Act 4, Facilitate Change, focuses on how to create change in others, one of the hardest things to do.

Each act has several scenes, and each scene begins with Emily or Paul facing a challenge at work or at home, such as dealing with an overwhelming volume of information to process first thing in the morning. I chose the characters’ particular daily challenges by gathering information, with an online survey I created. I then combined the resulting data with research from surveys of organizational culture.

After watching Emily or Paul go through a challenge in each scene, you get to find out what is going on inside her or his brain that is making life so difficult, and to hear directly from the neuroscientists I interviewed and from other relevant studies. The most fun part of the book is the take two at the end of each scene. In each take two, Emily and Paul understand their brains more and, as a result, make a different set of decisions moment to moment. The differences between take one and take two come from tiny changes in behavior, but these changes generate substantially different outcomes. Subtle internal changes, which happen within a fraction of a second and may not be noticeable to the outside world, can sometimes change everything. This book will help you understand, isolate, and reproduce such changes.

At the end of each scene, I summarize the big surprises emerging from brain research. If you want to use this book to change your brain more deeply, each scene includes a list of specific things to try for yourself.

The book finishes with an "encore," which summarizes the science and looks at the bigger implications of the research. I also include a list of further resources, and an extensive annotated bibliography about the studies I have drawn from. I make clear where and how I drew my own conclusions; otherwise, the ideas here are drawn from hundreds of scientific studies that you can read, too, if you like.

The performance starts soon, so it might help to know a little about the main characters and the setting. Emily and Paul are in their early forties. They live in a midsize city with their two teenage children, Michelle and Josh. Emily is an executive in a company that runs large conferences. Paul works for himself as an IT consultant, having spent his earlier years in a larger firm.

The action happens across a single day, an average Monday, normal except that it’s Emily’s second week of a new promotion. She now has a bigger budget and a larger team to manage. She is excited about her new role and wants to kick things off well, but she has some new skills to learn. Paul is pitching a new project that he hopes will help him grow out of the small home office he has had for five years. The two have plenty of other hopes and dreams, including bringing up their children well, despite their hectic work schedules.

Let’s raise the curtain and begin the show.

Act I

Problems and Decisions

More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits.

In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it’s so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain’s sweet spot. In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most.

Scene 1

The Morning Information Overwhelm

It’s 7:30, Monday morning. Emily gets up from the breakfast table, kisses Paul and her children goodbye, closes the front door, and heads to her car. After sorting out sibling squabbles all weekend, she is looking forward to focusing on her new job. As she heads toward the freeway, she thinks about her week ahead and how she wants to get off to a good start. About halfway to work, she gets an idea for a new conference, and has to concentrate hard to keep the idea in mind as she drives.

Emily is at her desk by eight o’clock. She turns on her computer, ready to flesh out this new conference idea. Then, she spies the awful truth: two hundred emails start to download. She has over fifty messages from her company chat, plus dozens of alerts from two other programs. A wave of anxiety washes over her. Answering the emails alone could take all day, but she also has hours of meetings booked and three projects due by six o’clock. Her excitement about the promotion is already beginning to fade. She loves the idea of the extra money and responsibility, but she isn’t sure how she’s going to cope with the increased workload.

Thirty minutes later, Emily realizes she has responded to only twenty emails, and hasn’t touched the chats people sent her, which could be urgent. She needs to speed up. She tries to read emails while listening to her voice mail. Her attention shifts for a moment to how her longer hours might impact her kids. She remembers how she snapped at them in the past when she was too busy at work. Then she remembers a promise she made to herself—to be a good role model by staying true to her career ambitions. Lost in thought, she accidentally deletes a voice mail from her boss.

The burst of adrenaline triggered by the lost message snaps her focus to the present. She stops typing and tries to think about the projects due today: writing a new conference proposal, crafting some marketing copy, and deciding which assistant to hire. Then there are all those emails, with dozens of different issues to follow up on. She spends several seconds trying to imagine how to prioritize everything, but nothing comes to mind. She tries to remember the guidelines she learned in a time-management course she took long ago, but despite a few seconds of focus, she can’t find the thread of the memory. She goes back to the emails and tries to type faster.

By the end of the hour, Emily has replied to forty emails and juggled the critical instant messages, but with the workday starting, there are now 120 emails waiting. She’s had no time to work on her new conference idea, either. Despite her good intentions, it’s not a great start to the day, the week, or her new position.

Emily is not alone. Workers everywhere are experiencing an epidemic of overwhelm. For some people, it’s the pressure of a promotion; for many others, a downsizing or reorganization; but for many, every day involves a constant, massive, and overwhelming volume of work. As the world digitizes, globalizes, unplugs, and reorganizes, having too much to do has become our biggest complaint.

For Emily to be effective in her new job, without destroying her health or her family, she needs to change how her brain works. She needs new neural circuitry for managing a significantly larger and more complex to-do list.

The trouble is, when it comes to making decisions and solving problems, as Emily is trying to do this morning, the brain has some surprising performance limitations. While the brain is exquisitely powerful, even the brain of a Harvard graduate can be turned into that of an eight-year-old simply by being made to do two things at once. In this scene, and in the next few to come, Emily and Paul are going to discover the biological limits that underlie mental performance, and in the process develop more brain-smart approaches to everyday challenges. As they change their brains, you will have the opportunity to change yours, too.

THE GOLDILOCKS INSIDE US ALL

Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The cortex is the outer covering of the brain, the curly gray stuff you see in pictures of brains. It’s a tenth of an inch thick and covers the brain like a sheet. The prefrontal cortex, which sits behind the forehead, is just one part of the overall cortex. The last major brain region to develop during human evolutionary history, it is a measly 4 to 5 percent of the volume of the rest of the brain.

Don’t be fooled, though. As with diamonds and espressos, sometimes good things come in small packages. Without a prefrontal cortex you wouldn’t be able to set any type of goal. Thinking Get some milk at the store would be impossible. You also wouldn’t be able to plan. You wouldn’t be able to say to yourself, Walk up the hill, go into the store, and purchase the milk, then walk back down. You wouldn’t be able to control impulses, so if you felt an urge to lie on a sun-warmed road on a cold day, you’d be in trouble. And you wouldn’t be able to solve problems, such as working out how to get to a hospital after a car has run you over. You would also have trouble visualizing a situation you’d never seen before, so you’d have no idea what to take to the hospital. And, finally, you wouldn’t be able to think creatively, so you wouldn’t be able to make up a good story to tell your wife when you finally got home from the hospital.

Your prefrontal cortex is the biological seat of your conscious interactions with the world. It’s the part of your brain central to thinking things through, instead of being on autopilot as you go about your life. In the last few decades, neuroscientists have made important discoveries about this region of the brain, in particular a team led by Amy Arnsten. Arnsten is a professor of neurobiology at Yale Medical School. Like her mentor, the late Patricia Goldman-Rakic, Arnsten has devoted her career to unlocking the mysteries of the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex holds the contents of your mind at any one point, Arnsten explains. It’s where we hold thoughts that are not being generated from external sources or from the senses. We ourselves are generating them.

While the prefrontal cortex is handy, it also has big limitations. To put these limitations in perspective, imagine that the processing resources for holding thoughts in mind were equivalent to the value of the coins in your pocket right now. If this were so, the processing power of the rest of your brain would be roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy (perhaps before the financial crisis of 2008). Or, as Arnsten explains, the prefrontal cortex is like the Goldilocks of the brain. It has to have everything just right or it doesn’t function well. Getting everything just right for the prefrontal cortex is what Emily needs to learn to do, to get on top of the extra information she is juggling in her new job.

THE STAGE

I am going to introduce a metaphor for the prefrontal cortex that will be used throughout the book. Think of the prefrontal cortex as a stage in a small theater, where actors all play a specific part. The actors in this case represent information that you hold in your attention. Sometimes these actors enter the stage as a normal actor would, from the side of the stage. This is the case when information from the outside world comes to your attention, such as when Emily watches her computer download hundreds of emails.

However, this stage is not exactly like the stage in an ordinary theater. Sometimes the actors might also be audience members who get onstage to perform. The audience represents information from your inner world: your own thoughts, memories, and imaginings. The stage is what you focus on at any one time, and it can hold information from the outside world, information from your inner world, or any combination of the two.

Once actors get on the stage of your attention there are lots of interesting things you can do with them. To understand a new idea, you put new actors on the stage and hold them there long enough to see how they connect to audience members—that is, to information already in your brain. Emily does this when she reads each email to understand its contents, and hopefully you are doing this right now with this book. To make a decision, you hold actors onstage and compare them to one another, making value judgments. Emily does this as she reads each email and decides how to respond.

To recall information, meaning to bring a memory from the past back to mind, you bring an audience member up on the stage. If that memory is old, it might be at the back of the audience, in the dark. It can take time and effort to find this audience member, and you might get distracted along the way. Emily struggles with trying to remember rules for managing emails from a training course, but the information is too far back in the audience, so she gives up. To memorize information, you need to get actors off the stage and into the audience. Emily tries to memorize an idea for a new conference while driving, but finds this effort tiring.

Sometimes it’s important not to focus on an actor, to keep him off the stage. For example, you might have a tight deadline at lunchtime and are trying to focus on a project, but you find the thought of lunch keeps jumping into your awareness, distracting you for half a minute each time. The process of inhibition, of keeping certain actors off the stage, requires a lot of effort. It’s also central to effective functioning in life. Emily, distracted as she ruminates on how she is going to cope in her new job, accidentally deletes a voice mail as a result.

These five functions, understanding, deciding, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting, make up the majority of conscious thought and are recombined to plan, problem-solve, communicate, and other tasks. Each function uses the prefrontal cortex intensively and requires significant resources to operate, far more resources than Emily realizes.

THE STAGE NEEDS A LOT OF LIGHTING

Recently my wife and I walked up the hill to the local shops—for some milk, funnily enough—and my wife asked me a question that I had to stop walking to answer. Everyone knows that walking up a hill takes energy. It turns out that conscious mental activities do, too, and I didn’t have enough energy to do both.

Conscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources, the fuel in your blood, significantly faster than automatic brain functions such as how your brain helps keep your heart beating or your lungs breathing. The stage requires a lot of energy to function. It’s as if the lights are a long way back from the stage, so you need a lot of them, all on full, to see the actors. To make matters worse, the power to light the stage is a limited resource, decreasing as you use it, a bit like a set of batteries that constantly need recharging.

The first clinical evidence for this limitation came way back in 1898. The scientist J. C. Welsh measured people’s ability to do physical tasks while thinking. She had subjects start a mental task and then asked them to impose as much force as they could, at the same time, on a dynamometer, a machine for measuring force. Her measurements showed that almost all mental tasks reduced maximum force, often by as much as 50 percent.

Doing energy-hungry tasks with your stage, such as scheduling meetings, might exhaust you after just an hour. In comparison, a truck driver can drive all day and night, his or her other ability to keep going limited only by his or her need for sleep. Driving a truck doesn’t require much use of the prefrontal cortex (unless you are a new driver, in a new truck, or on a new route). It involves another part of the brain called the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia are four masses in the brain driving routine activities that don’t require a lot of active mental attention. From an evolutionary perspective, the basal ganglia are an older part of the brain. They are also highly energy efficient, with fewer overall limitations than the prefrontal cortex. As soon as you repeat an activity even just a few times, the basal ganglia start to take over. The basal ganglia, and many other brain regions, function beneath conscious awareness, which explains why Emily can drive and think about a conference at the same time.

The prefrontal cortex chews up metabolic fuel, such as glucose and oxygen, faster than people realize. We have a limited bucket of resources for activities like decision making and impulse control, Dr. Roy Baumeister from Florida University explains, and when we use these up, we don’t have as much for the next activity. Make one difficult decision, and the next is more difficult. This effect can be fixed by drinking a glucose drink. Baumeister tested this hypothesis using lemonade sweetened with either glucose or a sugar substitute, and the impact on performance was marked.

Baumeister’s insight is a significant discovery about the machinery of the brain. Your ability to operate the stage has real limits because the stage needs a lot of fuel. It requires a lot of power to run, and this power drains as you use it. This explains many everyday phenomena such as why it’s easy to get distracted when you’re tired or hungry. When you get to two o’clock in the morning and can’t seem to think, it’s not you—it’s your brain. Your best-quality thinking lasts for a limited time. The answer is not always just to try harder.

Why does the mental stage require so much energy to function? Some scientists think the prefrontal cortex is energy hungry because it is still new in evolutionary terms and needs to evolve further to meet today’s information demands. Here’s a different perspective. When you understand the brain processes involved in an activity such as decision-making, you might be amazed at the capacity you do have. You might respect your limitations rather than fight them. Let’s explore this idea by going back briefly to another step in Emily’s story.

Emily walks into a conference room at 9:00 a.m. Her brain takes in a flood of data: a cacophony of sounds as three people speak at once, a vibrant mash of colors from flipcharts, people’s suits, and art on the walls, a multitude of shapes and movement, a dozen faces. The volume and complexity of information entering her brain at that moment would be enough to freeze any supercomputer. As Emily walks into the room, she uses her short-term memory to process incoming information. Large volumes of data enter her brain, but twenty to thirty seconds later, most of this data has gone. It’s like hundreds of new actors jumping on to the stage briefly and then running off. If you asked Emily a minute later what she had seen, she couldn’t tell who was wearing what, or describe what was on a flipchart, unless she stopped to pay close attention and noted these things in particular.

A moment later, Emily remembers why she has come there in the first place—to meet a new colleague named Madelyn for coffee. Her brain now has to manage three energy-hungry processes at once. These three processes involve many parts of her brain, but her prefrontal cortex manages the overall process. First, incoming data about the room, both visual and auditory, continue flowing into her short-term memory, yet now this data must be observed, in the way you might look at a car in the parking lot to see if it’s yours. You have to hold the data on the stage, which requires effort. This effort consumes energy.

Second, Emily must bring an image of Madelyn onto her stage, to compare the incoming information about the room to something. The image for Madelyn’s face is dredged out of trillions of bits of data held in Emily’s long-term memory. Emily needs to keep the circuits representing a picture of Madelyn active, to keep this actor on the stage, which also requires effort, and more energy.

Finally, Emily must keep in mind the idea of coffee. Otherwise, when she finds Madelyn, she will forget why she was looking for her.

These three processes—incoming data closely observed, Madelyn, and coffee—all need to remain active at the same time. Meanwhile, new data continues to enter her short-term memory that might disrupt these processes. There are now three groups of actors that require energy for Emily to keep them onstage, with new actors scrambling to get onstage that need to be kept off.

Emily finds Madelyn. Where should we go? Madelyn asks as they leave the room. No idea. I can’t think of anything just yet, Emily replies. Let’s walk around and see if we can find somewhere to sit and think.

What does Emily’s story mean? Perhaps you are now seeing (holding something on your own stage) that the mental stage is a hungry animal. You can take this information several ways. One option involves bemoaning the state of human functioning. The other option could be to send your assistant out for some glucose powder or today’s ready-made solution: a cola drink. (This option may help, though with some unfortunate possible side effects such as gaining weight, adding to your dental costs, or increasing the risk of Type 2 diabetes.) A third option, and the one I would suggest, is to rethink how you value and use this resource called the mental stage.

If the mental stage is a limited resource, it’s like other limited resources such as stocks, gold, or cash. Imagine if Emily treated her capacity to think in the same way her company managed its financial assets, with a tight control on spending. Instead, Emily wastes her resources by trying to hold an idea in mind about a new conference while she’s driving, tiring her brain before she even gets to work. Then she begins the morning by working through her emails. Processing large amounts of information uses a lot of resources, probably not the best use of her most important asset right then.

Here’s a new perspective: each time you use your mental stage, allocate it to something important. It is a limited resource that can’t be wasted. No matter how much effort you put in, you can’t sit there and make brilliant decisions all day the way a truck driver can stay on the road.

PRIORITIZE PRIORITIZING

If Emily knew how energy-hungry her stage was, she would start her Monday morning differently. The big difference is she would prioritize prioritizing. She would prioritize first, before any other attention-rich activity such as emailing. That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.

After even just a few mental activities, you may not have the resources left to prioritize. Using your stage for something energy intensive such as prioritizing is like flying one of those toy helicopters you see in parks, the ones that are supposed to be for kids but that dads actually buy for themselves. Once Dad gets the helicopter off the ground a few times, it won’t get off the ground again because the power is too low. It gets close, rising a few inches off, and then collapses back down. And the more you try, the less energy there is. Best to recharge and try again later. In a similar way, doing ten minutes of emailing can use up the power needed for prioritizing. Emily experienced this when she couldn’t see how to prioritize her day and ended up dealing with her emails instead. To understand why prioritizing is such a hungry beast, let’s explore a new idea: the varying degrees of difficulty of getting actors on the stage.

SOME ACTORS ARE HARDER THAN OTHERS TO GET ONSTAGE

This is a useful insight about the brain with broad implications, so bear with me here. It’s easy to bring to mind something that’s just happened. The circuit is easy to access, as it’s fresh, such as finding an audience member in the front row. Let’s try an experiment to make this real. Try to see, in your mind’s eye, what you ate for your last meal. Usually this takes just a moment, and little effort. Bringing recent events onto the stage is a relatively fast, low-energy activity. It’s like bringing an audience member from the front row onto the stage.

Now picture what you ate for lunch ten days ago. Unless you have a consistent pattern to draw on (I always have tuna fish sandwiches), picturing that meal takes several moments longer and a lot more effort than recalling a recent meal. The circuits involved in picturing the earlier lunch are farther back in the audience, so you have to take more time to scan the crowd to find them. Memory researchers show that recalling earlier memories requires tracing back in time, recalling in chronological order the events between now and when the memory was first formed. The farther back a memory is, such as Emily’s tips from a training course on dealing with email, the longer this task will take, and the more attention and energy it will require.

Now picture yourself preparing lunch for six in a Japanese restaurant in China. Easy, if you’re a Japanese chef who has worked in China!