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  • Your Brain at Work

  • Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long
  • By: David Rock
  • Narrated by: Bob Walter
  • Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (457 ratings)
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Your Brain at Work cover art

Your Brain at Work

By: David Rock
Narrated by: Bob Walter
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Summary

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's 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 listener, 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:

  • Why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources
  • Why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
  • How to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable problems
  • How to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible
  • How to collaborate more effectively with others
  • Why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier
  • How to be more effective at changing other people's behavior
©2009 David Rock (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about Your Brain at Work

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Beethoven on a Kazoo

One of the biggest problems with audio books in general is that they rely to a very large degree on the ability of the reader. Excellent material can be utterly spoilt by the narrator - and this is the case here. I have no-one to blame but myself. Listening to the sample I thought I could stand Bob Walter's extraordinary read. I was wrong. This professional reader has absolutely no idea of the meaning of the narrative. It is a self indulgent presentation by someone so enamoured with the sound of his own voice that the meaning is buried beneath a dreadfully inept delivery. The book itself is excellent - and David Rock has achieved another sale because I had to buy the hard-copy to extract the value. So do yourself a favour - cut out the middle man and read this one the old fashioned way.

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39 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Terrible narration

Interested in the content of this book, but I can't get going with it because the narrator is just awful. The rhythm of his delivery sounds completely random - as if he isn't actually paying attention to the context of what he is reading, or hasn't looked at it in advance. The effect is so unbelievably distracting that I can't listen to more than a few minutes without going insane. Really disappointed. Avoid (or buy the printed version).

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32 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

one of the best self help books ever written

A fantastic piece of work.

I'm on my second read-through. I have bought a hard copy on Amazon to use as a reference. This is the best of recent psychology put into a practical self-improvement book.

Personally, I am developing a strategy to implement just about everything in this book that are not already doing.

I read many self-help books but I think this is one of the best ever written.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

hmmm, it must just be me?

Sorry, but this is just terrible.
It is so monotonous, and in all honesty all the 'advice' and 'insight' is just plain common sense - don't try to do too much at once, you use energy to think so have a snack, go for a walk to clear your head, brains are easily distracted so disconnect the phone, etc. etc. You don't need to sit and listen to a book for goodness knows how many hours to realise this - come on, you already know this stuff.

The whole 'take two' thing is a nice idea, but it just doesn't work because its all circumstantial given that the author can just say all the right things were done by the character, but this does absolutely nothing to help YOU do the right things; reading a book will never change the way your own brain functions, I'm afraid.

Oh, and if I ever hear 'PRE-FRONTAL CORTEX' ever again I will go insane. Just by saying a medical term lots and lots does not make this anything clever or insightful, just flipping annoying.

Finally, at the risk of sounding zenophobic, this book really is very 'American' in its tone and approach, so if you are into all this self-help stuff then perhaps you might get something from it (it is clear that my 'give it a go' approach to this did not pay off myself!), but otherwise it will probably just annoy the hell out of you.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Neuro Science meets self help

Very good; scientific research made applicable to every day situations. Listened twice now and becoming more used to the terms it's already helping the way I work daily and with others.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

A little bit anal, but probably useful

The subject (how to get more out of your brain) is fascinating, and many of David Rock's suggestions are worth considering, even if his style is rather lugubrious.

My brain is particularly badly behaved and hard to control, so there are many ideas that I am keen to put into practice. Examples: do not overload your small active memory (or 'stage', as Rock calls it). Concentrate on one topic at a time; this is more efficient than 'multi-tasking'. Do spend time on 'meta-work' - organising and prioritising your tasks. Chunk big ideas into sub-ideas and give them labels, chunk tasks into subtasks. Systematise repeated tasks into 'routines' so that you don't waste brain-energy each time you have to do this task. Do high energy tasks when you are high energy (e.g. fresh, morning) and reserve dumb tasks for when you suffer lower energy.

And of special interest to us at Audible: How Not to Lose Concentration When Listening to Your Audiobook. Well this is the tip: avoid distraction in the nano-second it starts to happen. Rock makes the sweet observation that 'We are not descended from ancestors who ignored a rustling in the long grass', but if you know there are no snakes around, you have to ignore the distraction from the get-go. Don't go there, don't let your 'Default Network' (the place your brain goes for a restful wander) kick in, in the first place - stay with the book! You must DIRECT your brain. Goodness, just burnt another half-hour doing book reviews.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent!

I listen to a lot of audiobooks on leadership and self improvement, and this was one of the best. I loved it. I almost didn't download it because of the reviews about the narrator, and whilst I could understand what other reviewers meant, it didn't detract from the message of the book. I really liked the original way the information was presented, in the form of a play. I liked the way the softer messages about how to behave and treat people, were backed up with hard neuroscience. For me, it brought a lot of things together that I had learnt from other books and helped me to understand why we do what we do, which was very empowering. I would really invest in a hard copy of this book too, as I feel it will become a book that I will want to refer to many times.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Really Really Interesting

I really enjoyed this book. Excellent subject matter and novel way of delivering the content.

The narrator is a little difficult to get used to at first, quite dry and slow paced, but once you become accustomed to his style its a good listen.

I especially liked the ending when it culminated in the SCARF acronym. I wont ruin it by expanding this but I found this to be very insightful and actually an enlightening view on human psychology.

All in all a good listen. I would have given 5 stars but the narrator was not quite to my taste.

Simon

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Probably the BEST audiobook ever

First of all, I was not bothered by Bob Walter's narration at all, in fact I liked his tone and pace, as well as his voice. The content of this book is so interesting and so dense that I found his slower narration helping me stay focused.

Second of all, this book is amazing. I think it might be the most useful book I have ever read. I am re-listening to it for the second time now because I find the methods David Rock recommends so useful for a happy, productive life. This is the ultimate self-help book, except that it is based on science, not BS. If every person on this planet read and lived by this book, humanity would be lightyears ahead of where we are now... Will buy the print version for reference. I highly recommend this audiobook!

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

My brain is now working

I love this audio book. It gives accounts of daily rituals which most of the population undertake and the obstacles that prevent us from achieving our potential. With practical advice and reasoning, and through repetitive actions, we can become so more efficient within our daily lives.
If you can learn how to anticipate your thought process and remove the habitual processes that prevent positive thoughts coming through, you can achieve so much more!
Great stuff!

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2 people found this helpful