Continuous Partial Attention? Go topless

One of my colleagues spotted this article in the LA Times, Silicon Valley Meetings go topless. It is slightly less exciting than it sounds – its about the impact of banning laptops and other communications devices from meetings. Sounds like a good idea to me.

It happens regularly in our consulting and training sessions that people will have laptops or ‘Crackberries’ and be distracted by something there. Whatever the claims for multitasking it is just not possible to do your best work when you are distracted – and as we saw in previous posts on constant interruptions and what to do about them, distractions happen all the time.

I liked a phrase in the article “continuous partial attention” which sums it up well. You might also enjoy Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post on “no laptop” meetings.

Be there now sounds a bit Zen but it is the only way to do really good work. It would also help if meetings were participative and relevant enough to hold our attention, but that’s another post.

Have you or your company tried something like this? How did it go?