There’s an interesting article in today’s (6/22/09) New York Times, titled “Mind Your Blackberry or Mind Your Manners.”  It says,

“As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.”

What’s happening is that people in face-to-face meetings are not necessarily paying attention to each other, and this is causing problems between companies and their clients, and between managers and employees. One issue apparently is that people are getting bored in face-to-face meetings and even in one-on-one encounters, so they’re turning to their multifaceted gadgets for entertainment.  (Could it be that having grown up watching fast-paced TV, we find another person talking just too slow-moving for us?)  Another issue is that some people feel they need to be available to their clients 24/7 (and some clients agree), and so they cannot afford to ignore any communication that may come in.

Some people, understandably, consider it rude to tweet, text, or email someone else or to seek refuge in sports scores or entertainment while being spoken to. Although people differ on this point of etiquette, it is fair to say that if you’re reading or writing something on your electronic device, you are not processing the verbal information that’s being directed at you face-to-face.  Oh, you may get bits and pieces of what is being said to you, but information-processing research shows that the brain can pay attention to only one thing at a time.  What seems like multitasking is really rapid task-switching, which interferes with both simultaneous tasks.

What’s the solution for businesses?  Banning Smartphones from meetings has been tried by some companies — but many environments and many individuals may not accept this approach.  Perhaps one should ask: If people are constantly using their Smartphones for irrelevant tasks during meetings, could it be that some meetings are inessential or that they are going on for too long?

As for the need to be constantly available to corporate clients, that may not be negotiable, but perhaps it can be.  It has been estimated that unnecessary interruptions (much of this via technology) cost U.S. businesses $650 billion per year.  Perhaps if it became more commonly known how devastating constant interruptions are to both productivity and creativity, people who need to stay in touch would work out arrangements for connecting with each other in ways that allow for emergencies, but do not consider every contact urgent.  Or, co-workers could spell each other at the PDA so that each of them could take turns having uninterrupted creative time on a regular basis.

Last year, an employee at Intel reported a pilot study on an attempt to improve productivity by instituting a 4-hour “Quiet Time” on Tuesdays in which interruptions were minimized.  Not only did the research report improvements in “effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life,” but if you look at the comments that follow the blog post of the report, you’ll see much agreement with the concept, and mentions of similar solutions at other companies.

In order for solutions like “Quiet Time” to work, employees have to be on board and agree with the concept. Companies will find more success by motivating their employees to be as effective as they can and by providing suggestions like “Quiet Time” than by dictating what can and should be done and when.  This is why in my keynote/workshop titled “You’ve Got (too much) Mail! — Preserving Productivity Under Information Overload,” I provide demonstrations of how (poorly) the brain works under Multitasking and Information Overload, and then provide strategies for working creatively and productively by harnessing our communication devices rather than letting them ride roughshod over us.

On April 18th, I made a brief presentation to the Madison Civics Club about the impact of technology on adults, with some tips on reducing stress and enhancing creativity in our media-dominated world.  This was done in conjunction with a presentation by Anastassia Goodstein, expert on the media-saturated lives of tweens and teens.  Many members of the audience agreed with me that this is as important an issue for adults as it is for young people.  Follow this link to  my presentation.

A recent article in the Archives of General Psychiatry and reported in the Los Angeles Times shows that the amount of time adolescents spend viewing television is related to the probability that they will later experience clinical depression. There are very few studies exploring this possible link, but this study is impressive because it’s based on a national probability sample (The National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health), that assesses kids’ behavior and health issues across a seven-year period.

Even controlling for depressive symptoms at Time 1, the more time kids spent watching television (and with media generally) at Time 1, the higher the odds of developing depression at time 2.  Of course, it can be argued that kids who were already prone to depression may have sought to cope by watching more TV, but the fact that the study controlled for early symptoms of depression makes this explanation less likely. 

It may be that spending too much time with media robs kids of time that they could spend in positive interactions with other kids or adults, and it’s also possible that what kids watch on TV has a tendency to make them both depressed and anxious.  

This adds one more piece of evidence for parents to be concerned about if find their kids becoming couch potatoes.  In the least, parents should pay attention to how much and what their kids are watching as well as being involved in their kids’ lives in other important ways.

All the media at our disposal — laptops, blackberries, TVs, cellphones, ipods, old-fashioned car radios — mean we’re multitasking more and more, to the extent that “single-tasking” seems to be a rarity.  We don’t even need two gadgets to multitask anymore. We can email, IM, twitter, and surf the internet on one device, and when we watch TV news, sports, or financial shows, we watch the crawl and the changing stats while listening to the talking heads or watching an event happening.  This is “efficient” in some ways — doing more than one thing in the same time frame.  But it comes with a cost.  We definitely get less information because we can’t focus our attention on two things at once. Neuroscience has confirmed that. So what we do is get bits and pieces of the multiple things we’re trying to keep up with. We either miss a lot, or we can go back and replay what we’ve missed (not very efficient after all).  It’s true that many people feel uncomfortable with single-tasking these days: the speed of regular conversations has become too slow-moving for them. Pauses are not to be used to contemplate what has just been seen or heard or to relate it to what we already know.  Pauses are to be filled with something else!  

Switching back and forth between paying attention to two different things is difficult for our brains; we definitely lose something with each transition. When we multitask our entertainment, we also lose much of the enjoyment: Good movies are painstakingly created to give us visual images and sounds meant to be focussed on continuously; and they create a rhythm and pace designed to capture and affect our emotions. When we switch back and forth, we get less than we deserve. Maybe movie theaters will retain their allure for this reason. As I blogged a couple of days ago, football stadiums are trying to become more like living rooms, allowing people to tune into replays, ongoing stats, and other outside sources of information while in the stadium.  Apparently this is what fans want.

There are times when focusing on only one thing really enhances the experience and other times when this may not be as essential. But to get the most out of what you’re doing, it’s a good idea to be aware of which times are which.