Your Brain at Work - David Rock

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.

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.

“We have a limited bucket of resources for activities like decision making and impulse control,”

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.

people define how they will feel in the future based more on the way they feel today, instead of correctly assessing the mental state they might be in at a future date.

Use the brain to interact with information rather than trying to store information, by creating visuals for complex ideas and by listing projects.

Schedule the most attention-rich tasks when you have a fresh and alert mind.

there’s a limit to how much information can be held in mind and manipulated at any one time.