I was asked to deliver a report for a business group and, when I arrived, I noticed ALL the attendees were seated around a table –and each person had their laptop open.
When I delivered my report, the people in the meeting kept typing on their laptops, rather than looking at pictures shown to illustrate points. This caused them to miss (and even question) key items.
Does this ever happen in your meetings? If so, be very careful.
Please think with me.
Suppose you have 6 people in your meeting and you lose 20 minutes time because of distractions, misunderstandings, or confusion. Please now multiply 20 minutes times the 6 people and you’ll see that your group just lost 120 minutes (2 hours). Yipes!
Let’s forget the meeting I attended, and let’s skip yours too.
Instead, please look at The Harvard Business Review February 17 Daily Stat article titled “Examining the Affects of Students Multitasking With Laptops During the Lecture”. You’ll find this article at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4041/is_201007/ai_n55069244/?tag=content;col1
The article is well researched and it shows how memory is affected by the distraction of multitasking on laptops, etc.
As we’ve discussed in this blog, you only get 24 hours a day and, if you don’t MASTER the time you get, TIME will master you. (And, sadly, many meetings today are major time wasters).
I’ll discuss the components of effective meetings in a future post if you’d like. Meanwhile, If you have questions or comments, please put them here.