8 ms·

If you multitask, so will your team

132 points by endlessvoid94 9y ago

mixmastamyk 9y ago
The urge to multitask is proportional to the time taken by the meeting. Keeping it concise should improve focus.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  And let people know why they are there. I've been in countless meetings where it's been unclear why y presence was required.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  The time is just a proxy for the importance you place on the meeting. Simple examples: In a one-on-one meeting, you're not going to open your laptop. You have to hold up your end. In a meeting in which you know you will be answering questions, you'll be paying attention. In a meeting which is about your work and decisions will be made, you pay attention. Then again, in a meeting which is about work you care about, you pay attention. Now the antitheses: if the meeting has many attendees, and you don't need to answer questions, and decisions about your work aren't being made... why are you even there? In fact, why are most people there? Is it a group bonding activity? That's a legitimate thing, but it should be fairly infrequent.
  - jrs235 9y ago
    Or, in a meeting where one participant does all the talking... That's a lecture and not a meeting. The content can be documented centrally and emailed to everyone. Sometimes that one participant crowds out the voices of others so no one bothers to speak up... The leader of the meeting needs to be confident enough to interrupt the person taking more than their fair share of time and then try to get participation from others in the group. Being wholly ready to cut off the aggressive personality that wants to constantly talk or repeat the same thing(s) over and over.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Sometimes a lecture is good though. If you want to teach someone a new concept, a lecture is probably better than just a document.
      - jrs235 9y ago
        So long as that's the meeting's agenda.
guynamedloren 9y ago
Great post Dave. Succinctly put. You're being generous with the email example.. what's worse (and probably more common) is when it's unrelated to work altogether: Instagram.
mrmondo 9y ago
While I agree if the meeting is important - often one can’t help but be dragged to meetings that are run poorly. Or situations where ones input is only valuable for a limited period of time or around a certain subject matter. If it’s an hour long meeting and management or project managers have organised it - chances are I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be getting things done. Of course I don’t turn up with my laptop open, not only would that be rude it would also be presumptuous as to the quality of the meeting. However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  In that last case, apply the law of two feet and just leave - and make it so that anyone can do that if the meeting is just someone trying to be relevant and showing off powerpoint-fu.
  - vog 9y ago
    Note that this works only well if the law of two feet has been established prior to the meeting. Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave. Among others, this avoids awkward situations where you are needed 5 minutes later, and people have to wait for you to come back. In that case, your behaviour would be (rightfully) perceived as passive-aggressive rather than constructive.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Indeed. Someone did that in a meeting I was in and was informed (not by me) that if he did it again he would be subject to disciplinary procedures.
    - jackpeterfletch 9y ago
      > Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave. Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So much passive aggression, frustration, and abrasiveness injected into the work environment just because people don't have the face to say "Hey guys, if theres nothing else for me/for me to add here im going to drop off the call/go back to my desk." I do this in about 30% of the meetings im in, probably twice in 5 years someones said they'd actually like me for something they were going to lead onto, and both times it was genuine. Also, if you run a meeting, and you move onto something that doesnt need all parties, you can just say "So we're going to move onto X, you guys might not be so interested in so feel free to leave, unless of course you want to stay" Never any hard feelings either way. It just business.
paulus_magnus2 9y ago
If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small — or perhaps nonexistent — problem The problem is we're primarily aligning with the need of the shareholder, not the customer / user. I can't think of a user who requested 24/7 surveillance of their actions in order to receive more targeted ads.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  If that's what you're working on your "user" is the advertiser.
ckastner 9y ago
> Someone calls a meeting and 5 people show up, each carrying a laptop So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes). If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.
- gridscomputing 9y ago
  i feel like Augmented Reality could help this situation.
- firepoet 9y ago
  Amen!
collyw 9y ago
Seems to overlook how irrelevant some meetings are to some staff.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  This article is geared toward leaders and points out that whipping out your laptop signals you don't think the meeting is important.
  - brazzledazzle 9y ago
    Exactly. I hope my manager sees this article because I die a little inside every time we have to explain something we've already discussed in that meeting or previous ones because he got distracted by his laptop. Sometimes the same thing multiple times in different meetings. Sometimes even in 1:1s (tbf I'm remote so we use webcams). If you can't pay attention to the answer to the question you just asked or the meeting you scheduled ditch the laptop or close Slack and email. The tiny things you do are picked up on by your staff.
notyourday 9y ago
If people bring laptops to the meeting, then they do not need to be there. If meeting organizer realizes that everyone brought laptops to the meeting, the meeting organizer needs to realize that there was no point in the meeting.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
abrongersma 9y ago
You hit the nail on the head with this one Dave. I'm dealing with this issue with my new team. My solution was to only bring my Ipad to meetings with me. It does a great job of keeping me constrained to Evernote or jira. Using an Apple Pencil helps me to keep my eyes on the presenter and not drift into multi-task land. If I set a good example, hopefully my team will drop some of the bad habits.
minton 9y ago
At my company we have weekly all-hands meetings. It lasts about an hour as ~15 people take turns giving updates. I’d say 95% of this meeting is just verbalizing the kanban board. I’d say 80-90% of the meeting isn’t applicable to most attendees except the owner who needs to be aware of everything. I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.
- colanderman 9y ago
  Lucky. We do that every day. (20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)
  - firepoet 9y ago
    If people aren't getting value from a meeting, they should stop doing it. Or reflect on why they were doing it in the first place. Talk about it at retrospective! Or sooner! You do have those, right? :-) I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer. That's how much I believe in it. Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..
  - samnwa 9y ago
    Maybe you think there is no value, but don't realize the information you or others glean from the meeting pays off. Perhaps think about what value could come from these meetings and then determine whether you are getting it.
    - colanderman 9y ago
      The psychological toll of being held to recount and justify my actions of the past 24 hours, every single day, is wholly demoralizing. I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do? We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.
534b44a 9y ago
I'm currently reading this during a meeting. Hell of a coincidence!
apo 9y ago
Ironically, many of these managers who find it so difficult to focus on the meetings they're supposed to be leading are are terrible at email as well. Either they flat-out can't write, or mis-use the medium altogether for things that should be handled face-to-face. Communications technologies can make good people better, but they can also amplify the incompetence of people who owe their current positions to the Peter principle.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  There's no irony there. Someone who multitasks gives both tasks short shrift.
redleggedfrog 9y ago
If I saw someone with a laptop or their phone, or whatever, sitting in one my meetings not paying full attention to the issue at hand, we'd be having a talk and there'd be a piece of paper with some bad things written on it and you've got a strike. I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand. If you don't want to pay attention you're probably at the wrong job.
- piva00 9y ago
  Or the meeting is not following the agenda. Or people are overlapping discussions without coming to fruition. Or the current part of the meeting is well known by the person and they are bored. There are a myriad of reasons why someone check their phones and laptops at meetings. I don't like it, I don't bring my laptop if not strictly needed (I'm presenting something or need to support the presenter), I don't pick my phone up at any time because I feel that is disrespectful. With that said, I'm dying of boredom in some meetings where the meeting-holder does not have a clue on how to proceed with one, I constantly have to stop people on the third or fourth level deep of an unrelated discussion. I agree on you having a rule for "no phones, no laptops" but then you have the burden on carrying those meetings optimally, if not you've failed and have no right on asking others to behave if you haven't provided a good environment for that. Also: I don't like these kind of extreme measures on petty issues, meeting distractions is a solvable problem without the need to shame people, I'd definitely be on the wrong job if that is your stance.
  - redleggedfrog 9y ago
    Then you should say, "I'm wasting company time in this meeting." And I'd make sure I'd gotten what I want from you and then let you go if I had it. And I'd appreciate it. At programmer rates today, it's more than a $1 a minute. That's not petty.
    - nsxwolf 9y ago
      That's a weird way to measure productivity. You're not really paying for minutes.
solatic 9y ago
I largely agree with Dave, but it's important to think about what you wish the alternative to be. If you ban laptops from meetings, what do you do when people pull their phones out? Are you going to ban phones from meetings too? What about daydreams, are you going to ban those too? I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded? Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  I really enjoyed reading your response. I think your point can be seen everywhere: commanding desired behaviour never works well, facilitating and encouraging it does.
- bpp 9y ago
  100% agree with this. I'm working with a new team and our (remote) PM loves scheduling long meetings (60 minutes when we sometimes finish in 20). I'm trying to help him see that we don't need to block out 30 or 60 minutes for a meeting just because those are easiest on Google Calendar.
  - digaozao 9y ago
    Probably a cultural thing. I don't see a problem with this. Depending on the meeting, there is no way it will end in 15 or 45 minutes. If it finishes earlier, great! everybody goes back to work. Sometimes it goes longer, and people have to check if it's being productive, or if they need to gather more info to come back later to subject. 30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.

132 points by endlessvoid94 9y ago

mixmastamyk 9y ago

The urge to multitask is proportional to the time taken by the meeting. Keeping it concise should improve focus.

mrweasel 9y ago
And let people know why they are there. I've been in countless meetings where it's been unclear why y presence was required.
dsr_ 9y ago
The time is just a proxy for the importance you place on the meeting. Simple examples: In a one-on-one meeting, you're not going to open your laptop. You have to hold up your end. In a meeting in which you know you will be answering questions, you'll be paying attention. In a meeting which is about your work and decisions will be made, you pay attention. Then again, in a meeting which is about work you care about, you pay attention. Now the antitheses: if the meeting has many attendees, and you don't need to answer questions, and decisions about your work aren't being made... why are you even there? In fact, why are most people there? Is it a group bonding activity? That's a legitimate thing, but it should be fairly infrequent.
- jrs235 9y ago
  Or, in a meeting where one participant does all the talking... That's a lecture and not a meeting. The content can be documented centrally and emailed to everyone. Sometimes that one participant crowds out the voices of others so no one bothers to speak up... The leader of the meeting needs to be confident enough to interrupt the person taking more than their fair share of time and then try to get participation from others in the group. Being wholly ready to cut off the aggressive personality that wants to constantly talk or repeat the same thing(s) over and over.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Sometimes a lecture is good though. If you want to teach someone a new concept, a lecture is probably better than just a document.
    - jrs235 9y ago
      So long as that's the meeting's agenda.

guynamedloren 9y ago

Great post Dave. Succinctly put. You're being generous with the email example.. what's worse (and probably more common) is when it's unrelated to work altogether: Instagram.

mrmondo 9y ago

While I agree if the meeting is important - often one can’t help but be dragged to meetings that are run poorly. Or situations where ones input is only valuable for a limited period of time or around a certain subject matter. If it’s an hour long meeting and management or project managers have organised it - chances are I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be getting things done. Of course I don’t turn up with my laptop open, not only would that be rude it would also be presumptuous as to the quality of the meeting. However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
In that last case, apply the law of two feet and just leave - and make it so that anyone can do that if the meeting is just someone trying to be relevant and showing off powerpoint-fu.
- vog 9y ago
  Note that this works only well if the law of two feet has been established prior to the meeting. Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave. Among others, this avoids awkward situations where you are needed 5 minutes later, and people have to wait for you to come back. In that case, your behaviour would be (rightfully) perceived as passive-aggressive rather than constructive.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Indeed. Someone did that in a meeting I was in and was informed (not by me) that if he did it again he would be subject to disciplinary procedures.
  - jackpeterfletch 9y ago
    > Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave. Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So much passive aggression, frustration, and abrasiveness injected into the work environment just because people don't have the face to say "Hey guys, if theres nothing else for me/for me to add here im going to drop off the call/go back to my desk." I do this in about 30% of the meetings im in, probably twice in 5 years someones said they'd actually like me for something they were going to lead onto, and both times it was genuine. Also, if you run a meeting, and you move onto something that doesnt need all parties, you can just say "So we're going to move onto X, you guys might not be so interested in so feel free to leave, unless of course you want to stay" Never any hard feelings either way. It just business.

paulus_magnus2 9y ago

If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small — or perhaps nonexistent — problem The problem is we're primarily aligning with the need of the shareholder, not the customer / user. I can't think of a user who requested 24/7 surveillance of their actions in order to receive more targeted ads.

emodendroket 9y ago
If that's what you're working on your "user" is the advertiser.

ckastner 9y ago

> Someone calls a meeting and 5 people show up, each carrying a laptop So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes). If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.

gridscomputing 9y ago
i feel like Augmented Reality could help this situation.
firepoet 9y ago
Amen!

collyw 9y ago

Seems to overlook how irrelevant some meetings are to some staff.

emodendroket 9y ago
This article is geared toward leaders and points out that whipping out your laptop signals you don't think the meeting is important.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  Exactly. I hope my manager sees this article because I die a little inside every time we have to explain something we've already discussed in that meeting or previous ones because he got distracted by his laptop. Sometimes the same thing multiple times in different meetings. Sometimes even in 1:1s (tbf I'm remote so we use webcams). If you can't pay attention to the answer to the question you just asked or the meeting you scheduled ditch the laptop or close Slack and email. The tiny things you do are picked up on by your staff.

notyourday 9y ago

If people bring laptops to the meeting, then they do not need to be there. If meeting organizer realizes that everyone brought laptops to the meeting, the meeting organizer needs to realize that there was no point in the meeting.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

abrongersma 9y ago

You hit the nail on the head with this one Dave. I'm dealing with this issue with my new team. My solution was to only bring my Ipad to meetings with me. It does a great job of keeping me constrained to Evernote or jira. Using an Apple Pencil helps me to keep my eyes on the presenter and not drift into multi-task land. If I set a good example, hopefully my team will drop some of the bad habits.

minton 9y ago

At my company we have weekly all-hands meetings. It lasts about an hour as ~15 people take turns giving updates. I’d say 95% of this meeting is just verbalizing the kanban board. I’d say 80-90% of the meeting isn’t applicable to most attendees except the owner who needs to be aware of everything. I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.

colanderman 9y ago
Lucky. We do that every day. (20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)
- firepoet 9y ago
  If people aren't getting value from a meeting, they should stop doing it. Or reflect on why they were doing it in the first place. Talk about it at retrospective! Or sooner! You do have those, right? :-) I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer. That's how much I believe in it. Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..
- samnwa 9y ago
  Maybe you think there is no value, but don't realize the information you or others glean from the meeting pays off. Perhaps think about what value could come from these meetings and then determine whether you are getting it.
  - colanderman 9y ago
    The psychological toll of being held to recount and justify my actions of the past 24 hours, every single day, is wholly demoralizing. I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do? We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.

534b44a 9y ago

I'm currently reading this during a meeting. Hell of a coincidence!

apo 9y ago

Ironically, many of these managers who find it so difficult to focus on the meetings they're supposed to be leading are are terrible at email as well. Either they flat-out can't write, or mis-use the medium altogether for things that should be handled face-to-face. Communications technologies can make good people better, but they can also amplify the incompetence of people who owe their current positions to the Peter principle.

emodendroket 9y ago
There's no irony there. Someone who multitasks gives both tasks short shrift.

redleggedfrog 9y ago

If I saw someone with a laptop or their phone, or whatever, sitting in one my meetings not paying full attention to the issue at hand, we'd be having a talk and there'd be a piece of paper with some bad things written on it and you've got a strike. I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand. If you don't want to pay attention you're probably at the wrong job.

piva00 9y ago
Or the meeting is not following the agenda. Or people are overlapping discussions without coming to fruition. Or the current part of the meeting is well known by the person and they are bored. There are a myriad of reasons why someone check their phones and laptops at meetings. I don't like it, I don't bring my laptop if not strictly needed (I'm presenting something or need to support the presenter), I don't pick my phone up at any time because I feel that is disrespectful. With that said, I'm dying of boredom in some meetings where the meeting-holder does not have a clue on how to proceed with one, I constantly have to stop people on the third or fourth level deep of an unrelated discussion. I agree on you having a rule for "no phones, no laptops" but then you have the burden on carrying those meetings optimally, if not you've failed and have no right on asking others to behave if you haven't provided a good environment for that. Also: I don't like these kind of extreme measures on petty issues, meeting distractions is a solvable problem without the need to shame people, I'd definitely be on the wrong job if that is your stance.
- redleggedfrog 9y ago
  Then you should say, "I'm wasting company time in this meeting." And I'd make sure I'd gotten what I want from you and then let you go if I had it. And I'd appreciate it. At programmer rates today, it's more than a $1 a minute. That's not petty.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    That's a weird way to measure productivity. You're not really paying for minutes.

solatic 9y ago

I largely agree with Dave, but it's important to think about what you wish the alternative to be. If you ban laptops from meetings, what do you do when people pull their phones out? Are you going to ban phones from meetings too? What about daydreams, are you going to ban those too? I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded? Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.

Waterluvian 9y ago
I really enjoyed reading your response. I think your point can be seen everywhere: commanding desired behaviour never works well, facilitating and encouraging it does.
bpp 9y ago
100% agree with this. I'm working with a new team and our (remote) PM loves scheduling long meetings (60 minutes when we sometimes finish in 20). I'm trying to help him see that we don't need to block out 30 or 60 minutes for a meeting just because those are easiest on Google Calendar.
- digaozao 9y ago
  Probably a cultural thing. I don't see a problem with this. Depending on the meeting, there is no way it will end in 15 or 45 minutes. If it finishes earlier, great! everybody goes back to work. Sometimes it goes longer, and people have to check if it's being productive, or if they need to gather more info to come back later to subject. 30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.