Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny recently blogged about a proto-trend he’s seeing in the workplace: meetings that advertise and enforce a “no laptop” rule. The idea behind this is that if people don’t really find a meeting important enough to pay attention to, they shouldn’t be there, and that we’ve reached the point where such common courtesy needs to be demanded rather than assumed.
It’s an attractive idea to anyone who has ever attended a meeting at which most of the people were paying more attention to their screen and keyboard than to the presenter. But in our view, this seemingly innocuous rule just makes the laptop a scapegoat for the underlying problems, which have little to do with laptops (or other devices) themselves.
There are two problems here. First, issuing a blanket ban on laptops at meetings ignores the very real benefits that they can bring to meetings. As typing dominates our working day, many of us take better notes on the keyboard than with a pencil and paper. Meeting presenters, of course, use the laptop to hold their slides and examples. At other meetings, it’s a real time-saver to be tied in live to an issue tracking database or a corporate calendar, so that information can be brought in and decisions recorded in the appropriate system quickly.
Second, if a meeting doesn’t demand the attention of the attendees, why blame the attendees rather than the meeting organizer? If people are distracted during your meetings, it’s time to consider the possibility that you are having too many meetings or inviting too many people. Attention doesn’t seem to be an issue at the truly important meetings in many organizations.
Of course, to some extent web workers have an advantage here: as long as you’re using a teleconference instead of a videoconference, and have a reasonably silent keyboard, no one can tell if you’re bringing your laptop (or even your desktop!) to a meeting. But it ought to be possible for reasonable adults to be engaged in a meeting whether they happen to have a laptop, a notepad, or a bagel in front of them. If they can’t, look to the underlying social and process issues, not to the handiest technology in the room, for the blame.
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