You need to use it in its proper way

The starting point for helping us be happier and productive at work has to be an appreciation of who and what we are.  When we design our work and work places to complement our strengths and support our 'weaknesses' you'll have happy, productive people.  Do the opposite and..........bleh! A workforce of stressed, unhappy, inefficient and unproductive people.  Yet our workplaces (and work) so often seem to be designed by evil geniuses bent on thwarting any chance we have at success.

What we are good at:

Creating

Imagining

Sorting

Pattern matching

Communicating (well, most of the time...)

Problem solving

Playing

Dreaming

Tinkering

experimenting

rule devising and testing

Taking action in ambiguous situations

Using 'rules of thumb' to take action in the face of uncertainty

Showing initiative and autonomy

Seeing 'the big picture'

What we haven't evolved so well to do:

Rote, repetitive tasks

Remember non-meaningful material and tasks

Perform frequent, repetitive tasks without error

Work without tiring

Detailed analysis (sure we can do this, but it is effortful and error-prone)

Remember long lists of tasks and information

Task switching and attention-switching (one of the worst features of the modern workplace)

Perform tasks that have no personal meaning - mindlessly following orders (stress, stress, stress!)

Details

So, our goal should be:

Maximise opportunities to take advantages of our strengths (list 1)

Minimise the need to do work that relies on our weak areas

Support people where they do need to do things that we weren't built to do well

There will always be lots of work tasks that unfortunately rely on areas where we are not strong.  Fortunately, there are lots of things we can do to make this much more tolerable.  A simple example is pen and paper.  Our memories for lots of 'meaningless' tasks is poor; but it is OK, we can write tasks down - we can make use of external memory.  In fact, we can do much, much better than this.  We can make use of a whole raft of job aids and software that take care of low-level processing tasks for us and let us concentrate on the big picture.  Do this well enough, and it can almost feel like we aren't having to worry about this stuff at all.  Even better, perhaps we can reorganise our work so certain tasks aren't necessary at all - it just takes imagination.

More on this later.