Atlassian has a concept of FedEx day wherein employees are free to do a project of their choice with people of their choice and have to show a tangible outcome.The whole idea behind doing the same is as mentioned by David Rock in the following extract from Your Brain at Work..
“In the workplace, in order to increase fairness some organizations allow employees to have “community days,” where they give their time to a charity of their choice.”
Adopted from the following insight shared by David Rock from his book Your Brain at Work
“Microsoft has a division that studies the way people work, to develop efficiency-improving software. (According to Microsoft’s research up to 2007, if you’re looking for a technological solution to being more efficient, getting a bigger computer screen is one of the few clear winners.)”
Adopted from the following saying of David Rock from his book Your Brain at Work..
“We all often think about what’s easy to think about, rather than what’s right to think about.”
Adopted from the following great insight shared by David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work..
“Study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test.”
Adopted from the following great quote of David Rock from Your Brain at Work..
“Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.”
Adopted from David Rock’s quote from Your Brain at Work
“1. Emails should contain as few words as possible. 2. Make it easy to see your central point at a glance, in one screen. 3. Never send an email that could emotionally affect another person unless it’s pure positive feedback. 4. Emotional issues must be discussed by phone; email should be used only to book a time for a call. 5. If you accidentally break rule number four, phone the person immediately, apologize, and discuss the issue by phone.”
Adopted from David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work..
Stage here refers to the capacity of the human brain..
“One final insight about prioritizing involves getting disciplined about what you don’t put on the stage. This means not thinking when you don’t have to, becoming disciplined about not paying attention to non-urgent tasks unless, or until, it’s truly essential that you do.”
Adopted from the following great quote of David Rock , book named Your Brain at Work..
“A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.”
David Rock in Your Brain At Work has touched upon this fascinating topic.
Arriving at an “insight” is purely a right brain activity to connect the dots as against going through a checklist of items.
Activities that give us peace of mind for e.g. meditation results in activation of right anterior temporal lobe to aid in arriving at an “insight” or an “eureka” moment.
Thus in order to arrive at insight we need to detach ourselves from hustle and bustle for peace of mind.
David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work, clearly explains the limitation of working memory capacity of the new rational human brain i.e. Prefrontal Cortex
As a result of this trying to perform more than one conscious task at a time can be detrimental in terms of performance.
Yet few people effectively multi task.They practice and practice to create habits out of mundane tasks e.g driving a car.The habits sit in long term memory i.e. Basal Ganglia and have nothing to do with working memory.This is precisely the reason that few have mastered the art of driving as well as taking conference calls at the same time.