About a year ago I picked up a new habit: multitasking in meetings.
I decided that bringing along my laptop to every meeting would give a hefty boost to my productivity since it would allow me to:
- take notes directly on my laptop, saving me all the time it takes to transfer notes from paper
- take advantage of idle meeting moments to do other things
- respond to any e-mail emergencies immediately
I thought that after years of honing my multitasking skills, I was ready to take on the last bastion of distraction-free work time (yes, meetings have turned into this).
A year later, the results were nothing less than disheartening. Most of my meeting notes were incomplete or incomprehensible, since proper note taking proved to be quite a challenging task, while working on other things. Furthermore, the meetings were too noisy for me to be able to adequately concentrate on other things and I really couldn’t ask anyone to keep their voice down. And finally, I realized that any e-mail emergency is not (or should not be) a real emergency.
In the end, I was neither contributing nor taking away much from these meetings. In several occasions, I could not properly recall many of the things that took place during the meeting. This is not surprising. In a 1957 Harvard Business Review article by Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard Stevens called “Listening to People” the authors concluded – after a series of studies on listening skills – that “immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard—no matter how carefully he thought he was listening”. Multitasking is not really careful listening.
I was also missing on one of the key benefits of being in a meeting: observing body language and people dynamics. But most of all, I realized that I was being uninspiring, if not disrespectful, to other meeting participants.
So I have decided that my laptop will not be attending any of my meetings and that if a meeting gives me an opportunity to work on other things, it is definitely a meeting I have no business attending.
