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.

An new study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, (reported on PsychCentral.com) reports that in a sample of more than 800 college students from around the country, the more time students spent playing video games, the poorer the quality of their relationships with their parents and peers.  This finding occurred to the surprise and disappointment of one of the authors, a graduate student. Of course, it’s unclear from a study like this whether video game play harms relationships by taking time away from interpersonal contact or whether students with poor relationships turn to video games to fill their empty time. The researchers suggest that it may be a curvilinear relationship.

But leaving aside the video game debate (and especially the violent video game debate that I’ve discussed before), I’ve been wondering about how much our constant connection to electronic gadgets in general interferes with that old-fashioned face-to-face communication that our brains were designed for. Of course, the more time we spend on solitary pursuits, the less time we have for each other.  But even when we’re in electronic contact with our friends and families — when we email, IM, twitter, and even call each other on our cellphones, we miss face-to-face communication. We can’t see how the other person is responding to what we say — are they understanding us? are they bored? are we on the same page? And they can’t see our arched eyebrow to know we’re just kidding, or our quivering lip to know we’re nervous or distressed.  

And we can’t share smiles! Brain research shows that when we smile and when we see someone genuinely smile at us, certain reward centers in the brain become active, and this makes us feel great. We lose this when we communicate mainly via our gadgets. Of course, our gadgets let us stay in contact with many more people, and with people who are far away, whom we may get to see only on rare occasions.  But if electronic communication becomes the main way we connect, we lose something very important.

The next time you have to stand in a long checkout line, rather than whipping out your cell phone and making a call to someone you know, try engaging the person behind you in a pleasant conversation (even if it’s about the weather or the length of the line!), and then give a big smile to the checker — no matter how sullen or bored she looks — and see if you can get her to smile back.  You’ll be surprised how wonderful this feels.