When I am on a particularly boring Zoom meeting, sometimes I multitask. I mute my microphone so that nobody can hear the telltale typing, and I get other stuff done.
Admit it, you’ve done the same thing. Some meetings just have a way too high time to interest ratio, and we all need to get stuff done.
In the future, when people are wearing extended reality glasses, I wonder whether this trend will continue. A person at the front of a meeting might see a sea of ostensibly interested faces, looking up attentively.
But in actuality, many of those people will zoning out by looking at the display built into their eyeglasses. Maybe they will be programming, or surfing YouTube videos, or shopping on-line. There won’t really be any way to know.
This is probably not a good thing. The alienation of people looking at their phones at least comes with a certain amount of social signaling. We can tell when someone is surfing their SmartPhone rather than paying attention in a meeting.
But when the screens move into our eyeglasses, that will no longer be the case. We may not have any idea who in the room is mentally present, and who is — for all practical purposes — somewhere else.
Without commenting on my own practices in this front, I wonder if this is one of the things that will differentiate people who are effective at what they do and those who are not.
If we assume that the easier it is to disengage like that without being caught, the more people will, then will a divide start to become apparent? Those that do may end up as being perceived as not very sharp, not following along, etc. They certainly will never interject with an insightful observation in a meeting.
In a single meeting, that’s no big deal. Over time, it adds up.
And they will probably become less sharp themselves. Some meetings are legitimately useless (but hopefully not too many), but if people get into the habit of disengaging because it’s easy, they will learn and know less, which compounds over time…
can’t wait for those glasses!
9/10 meetings are totally useless and a waste of time.
too long, too often, too many people.
this has gotten to a point where it is interrupting workflow and being detrimental to productivity.