Too Connected?

I sit in a lot of meetings. If you count classes as meetings then I am in A LOT of meetings. Today I posted an article on the NewsBeat page about running good meetings and one of their rules was: "No electronic grazing." No laptops, no cell phones, and no Blackberry.

It made me start to think, are these things tools, toys, or security blankets?

As someone without a laptop, but with a fairly sophisticated cell phone, I think I can say based on my own behavior and the behavior I have observed that in nearly all circumstances these things are toys.

Really, unless you are running a presentation or taking notes you simply just don't need the thing. Once, in a blue moon someone will need some piece of information that can be retrieved electronically, but in that case its just the one copy on the screen in front of the one person - not much use to the group. Even when someone just needs a particular fact it is rarely the person with the machine, and if it is you often hear as much cursing at not being able to find something as any kind of exclamation at having found the needle in the haystack.

More often you see: email, solitaire, instant messaging, web surfing...

As the person running the meeting (or teaching a class) when I notice someone using a computer for one of these things I feel like that person simply ought not to have come, that they certainly don't value their participation - why are they wasting my time? Here, I think, is a good rule of thumb: if you wouldn't do whatever it is that you are doing with your computer without the computer, then you shouldn't be doing it with the computer.

Can you see someone in a meeting going through their bills, spreading out a deck of cards on the table, talking to people while other people are speaking, talking on the phone, reading the paper? No, that would be rude? That little flip up screen doesn't make it not rude. Rude to the speaker and to everyone else in the meeting (at least the ones that aren't plunking on their computers).

Also, I think the laptop thing has made us a little lazy and complacent. Need the laptop to look up documents? Not if you are prepared for the meeting. Being able to bring one's office into the room I think is making for lousy meeting prep and therefore lousy meetings. Have to check your mail? No, really you don't. Need to be playing cards? Um, no, need to be participating in the meeting. It has become status quo for people to be surfing and working and whatever when they are gathered for a meeting. The whole point of the meeting was to get those people together to synch their processes and to inform and hear from the whole group. You can't do that while you are shopping on itunes.

You are in fact wasting your own time right along with everyone else's. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor, shut down your machine, and pay attention.