Your Brain at Work

The crowded workday of two parents, Emily and Paul, frames David Rock's account of how the brain copes with work. Emily is a newly promoted marketing vice president at a big corporation, and Paul is an independent IT consultant working from home or at client offices, and both face a constant flow of email, calls, meetings and proposals. Rock follows what happens inside their heads as they sort, rank, organize and act on information. Along the way he takes up why mental effort feels so draining, how to manage distractions, how insights arrive, how to stay calm enough to decide well, why feedback is hard to give, and how to change the behavior of others.

Lucid chief executive Jason Stirman found its account of how brains work through the day illuminating, especially as a manager of people, and Y-Productive marketing head Kyrylo Taranenko said it helped him set priorities while working remotely. Noah Kagan included it in his list of 18 books that changed his life.