can you hear me now?!?

I attend a lot of meetings: management, board, audit, various project committees, people trying to get “buy-in”, people looking for money, people wanting to express their opinion, people looking for advice or feedback, etc.  I figure, if you invite me to these meetings you want my undivided attention to the topic at hand and I respect you enough to give it.  If it’s a waste of my time I’ll tell you (or decline the meeting in advance).

More and more, over the years, I have noticed that a majority of the people in these meetings are also: on their laptops or blackberry, instant-messaging someone, doing email and half listening to the flow of conversation.  My mother would think this is incredibly rude, you engage in conversation, but I understand that some meetings can be quite dry and therefore finding something else to do is making the most of your time but, really,

when did multi-tasking cross over to “continuous partial attention“?

In the late 90’s Linda Stone coined the phrase continuous partial attention and a few years back she nailed it when she did a talk at Supernova 2005 and 2006 on Attention: The Real Aphrodisiac.  I just recently stumbled upon this and, wow, did it ever resonate with the meetings I have been going to of late.  So what am I talking about?  In Linda’s own words:

Continuous partial attention has been a way of life for many of us. It’s a post multi-tasking behavior. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task—we stir the soup, talk on the phone, notice the great homework little Rael brought home, answer the door, and so on. We get as many things done at one time as we possibly can.  In the case of continuous partial attention, we are motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network. We want to connect, we want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities—activities or people—in any given moment.

The pressure on us to be connected and on top of everything is so great today that we can’t give all of it our undivided attention but we can’t ignore it either.  I mean, really, there is email, general news, blogs, facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, … the list goes on.  How can we be on top of all of this and have a meaningful quality of life?

This always on, anywhere, anytime, any place era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis—the adrenalized Fight or Flight mechanism kicks in. It’s great when we’re being chased by tigers. How many of those 500 emails a day is a TIGER? Or are they mostly mice? Is everything really such an emergency? Our way of using the current set of technologies would have us believe it is.

One CFO that I greatly admire asks his meeting participants to turn their phones off and no laptops are allowed on the table.  It has got so bad in some of my meetings that while I am talking I randomly call out the name of someone I know isn’t paying attention to freak them out (kinda like the old days of school when you were nodding off).  Grrrrrr.

I guess what I want is meaningful, engaged dialogue in a shorter, efficient meeting where everyone’s attention is held by the topic at hand.  A girl can dream …

Thanks for listening to my rant - although, odds are you were also doing something else so you didn’t hear it.