Do you allow multi-tasking at staff meetings?
I'm seriously considering a no-multitasking rule at staff meetings. And if I have to make staff meetings pen and paper only to do it, I just may.
Why?
This is from Tim Ferris' blog. Josh Waitzkin (the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer) is describing a trip back to hear the last lecture of a favorite college professor...
"A few weeks ago, I returned to the classroom of Dennis Dalton, the most important college professor of my life. From the back of an amphitheater seating several hundred students, I realized how much things had evolved at Columbia and Barnard. The lecture hall was now equipped with a wireless sound system, webcams, video projectors, wireless internet. Students were using computers to record the lecture and to take notes. Heads were buried in screens, the tap tap of hundreds of keyboards like rain on the roof.
On this afternoon, April 16, 2008, Dalton was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world.
Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.
Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!"
The same thing happened to us. We were bringing in our laptops and cell phones into staff meeting and it was a big distraction, everybody was ADHD and therefore it was hard for people to focus and it undermined the community we wanted to build. So the issue was to eliminate technology. For 2 hours, everyone has to disconnect and go 20th century with a paper and a pen.
Posted by: Bill Reichart | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 06:02 AM