Ridding your mind of tasks, appointments, due dates, and so forth frees it up to do more important work. While the “brain dump” is a great (and simple) way to free up space in your mind, it is just one of the many ways in which we can improve our mental functions and abilities.
In David Rock’s book, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, Rock helps readers maximize their mental performance. He provides a high-level overview of how the brain works and explains why we get overwhelmed and stressed. He also provides several actionable strategies for improving weaknesses and making the most of your inherent mental abilities.
Here’s a summary from Amazon:
“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 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 reader, 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:
1) Why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources.
2) Why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
3) How to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable problems.
4) How to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible.
5) How to collaborate more effectively with others.
6) Why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier.
7) How to be more effective at changing other people's behavior.”
