Yes, I can understand having no email, im, etc, but no laptops is just plain stupid. That means you don’t want me to retain anything since I won’t be recording any next actions, etc in a place that I will refer to in the future. A better approach would be to just turn off the wireless for that area if you have to. If you can’t trust your employees to focus on the meeting, then ask them to work somewhere else.

First, most people in most meetings are completely clueless when it comes to running meetings, and participating in meetings. The average person should not be allowed to have their laptop because they’re just going to work on their email the whole time.

That said, sure, go with the ground rules of no laptops, no blackberries, etc. Have one person in charge of capturing notes and action points (on a laptop) who will send it to the whole group following the meeting.

Other attendees can have their laptops “available” in the case that they need to look up information or reference items… but other than that, go low tech and just participate in the discussion. You’ve got to be adamant about the rules though… if someone is not obeying, call them out.

Banning laptops just means that the speaker/presenter can’t tell quite as obviously when they’ve bored the crowd to tears. For too long, folks in meetings have been held hostage to boring, disorganized presenters who have no compunction about wasting everyone’s time. If people have an alternative, they’ll take it, and I think that’s really important feedback for a presenter.

I have seen a presenter, when confronted by folks doing email instead of engaging, ask “where did I lose you?”, and that feedback allowed the whole meeting to reengage and get back on track.

I cannot say enough about the need to get people’s attention during a meeting, but there has got to be some happy medium. I absolutely love the productivity I get out of my Mac-infested world (iPhone, MacBook Pro, etc…). However, when we have a meeting, sure people might be listening just enough to capture any major todos being offloaded to them, but they are in a zombie-like state. They don’t contribute (unless the conversation affects their workload for the negative) and they don’t want to be there. So, they check their email, chat, pretend to be monitoring a crucial server infrastructure in fakey-made-up-land.

Hello people!!! A meeting is supposed to be between people (conscious people), not half-borg morphs with their hands stuck on their digital devices. Perhaps, there can be proper rules and etiquette enforced that resolve some of this scenario, but I have to agree with mattw. If it is a well-run, organized meeting involving several people, someone should be in charge of organizing the agenda and sticking to it, not straying off on tangents that can be referenced from a computer. Keep the larger meeting to the agenda - brief and to the point (hand out an outline with space where everyone can make notes).THEN, after you’ve had the structured meetings involving human eye contact and interaction, you can then meet the small number of others that actually care about your reference material and you can all bring your laptops. People are less likely to zone out on their laptops with meetings of 2-5 anyway.

Ideas and solutions just don’t get produced when people are that distracted.

I agree that it’s good to make some meetings and discussions mobile device-free. But I think we’re back to the argument from a couple of weeks ago. Should we blame the tools? Probably not.

You can ban the laptops and mobile devices and tell people to bring notepads and pens. But you’ll then have to watch for the doodlers - they weren’t paying attention long before laptops and wireless came along.

If you are having meetings where people aren’t paying attention, the problem is deeper. Maybe we need to work on having more purposeful meetings.

I teach at a medical school, & over the past 3 years, there has been a proliferation of laptops brought into the classroom; & our IT dept has responded to student requests to provide wireless access throughout the building. There are obvious pros & cons to all this.

Last fall, I contracted with a class, on an experimental basis, to ban open computers in the classroom setting. Now this is not about cyberphobia or old-school ludditism on my part - I'm an edugeek, I built & maintain our school's online learning management system, create multimedia learning objects for student use, &c. - but in the classroom setting, I was experiencing the presence of multiple black holes scattered about the room, sucking students' attention away from lecture, group discussion and active learning activities. Folks were using their laptops in the classroom setting in a variety of ways - taking notes, reviewing course material that should have been reviewed before arrival that day, checking email, surfing youtube, &c.

I had no student complaints or requests to end the experiment.

I did tho, anticipate a concern, and addressed this upfront - I promised my students that I would provide classroom activities that were worth their full undistracted attention, and asked them to let me know when I fell short on this promise.

This is a very important point; the t-shirt advertised on your page tells it all, really. We've all been in those meetings or classes, where there is much more of value to be gained by streaming John Stewart, or twittering away mystery science theater fashion with colleagues. If we take away the tecno-toys, we need to be prepared to be honest, & offer something of greater value.

Makes me wonder how much the techno-gadgets are the issue, v/s how much these are merely more visible modern surrogates for daydreaming, doodling, or just checking out generally? Perhaps the gadgets can be helpful to us as more visible indicators of how we have been disenfranchising our colleages/students all along - more visible and obvious indicators than the previous blank expressions.

Comes around to a principle of healing, tolle causam - treat the cause - don't merely suppress the symptomatic expression of disharmony. Perhaps we need to contract together to close the gadgets, and discern together the whats/wheres of their appropriate use; but we may need to allow their use to tell us something about how we operate our meetings/classrooms, and revise this in a way that does not leave folks wishing they were elsewhere at the moment - whether this is streaming the latest episode of lonelygirl15, or checking out in an old-school way independent of techno-gadgetry.

How about you just make the meetings short and interesting enough that everybody wants to pay attention.

On one recent project (six months, ten people), we held daily status meetings topless… but with the additional rigor of NO CHAIRS.

The idea was to make the meeting fast: say what you need to say, then shut up, because we’re wasting time in this stupid meeting, and it’s uncomfortable to be standing for a long time.

Nobody gives a shit about your weekend (in the context of the status meeting).

Important stuff was recorded on a whiteboard, and transcribed later for distribution.

It worked pretty well.

Another Point of view from Education.

Being in education gives you a great opportunity to watch people and then watch yourselves. While, we don’t have that many laptops… Teachers still have papers. Sometimes, I will see a teacher with a small stack. Getting a little grading done in a meeting of more than 90 people-good time to grade, ne? Most of the time, paper and a pen is enough to distract me. I’ve been driven to distraction by drawing.

In short, teachers act like their students. It’s normal. It’s hilarious. And the only time I feel like actually participating (or sticking my neck out) is when I am in a department only meeting. Fifteen people is better than 90.

hmm - i’m torn about this one. while i have to agree that it is far too easy to get pulled into your laptop and away from your meeting (resulting in zombie meetings), there are some benefits, especially when one is only partially familiar with the subject matter being discussed.

people will often drop acronyms and terms in the middle of a talk, and while i don’t mind asking the occasional question, i don’t want to detract from the meeting itself. in such situations, being able to quickly look something up on google can provide context to what the speaker is saying without sidetracking (and lengthening) the meeting. this sort of thing is more useful in talks or information sessions though, where one person is leading the session.

I can tell you from personal experience that the folks who have a laptop present during a business meeting do indeed get distracted.

Imagine having a business meeting about the development of a website. Six people are present, four of which have laptops open. The only two who didn’t were myself and my co-worker. We’ve been holding these meeting about once a week for a solid month. The result? My co-worker and I seem to have a whole lot more documentation and are more organized that most of the others involved in the project. The reason? I think the others are just getting way too distracted with what their doing with their laptops and not enough on what is being said in the meetings. You can take good notes with nothing more than a pad and pen and will retain much more information without the distraction of a laptop.

My wife is a law school student who is fixing to graduate. This year (and part of last year) she choose not to take her laptop to class with her. Instead she opted to take only a notebook for taking notes and such. The result? She found that she was less distracted, payed much more attention to what was going on in class, and retained a whole lot more knowledge.

There’s also something to be said about smart phones as well (ie. iPhones, Treos, Crackberrys, etc). I can’t tell you how many times I have been interrupted during a meeting and/or presentation because someone absolutely had to either answer their phone or check their e-mail. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs with some people. Some people just don’t understand that there is a time and a place to mess with your phone. During a meeting and/or presentation isn’t it. You should concentrate your attention on the business at hand and save the phone call and/or e-mail for processing at a later time.

In my experience, a lot of meetings are a near-total waste of time for many of the participants. I once worked in a department that had near-daily status meetings we all had to attend, even though we weren’t collaborating with each other and thus didn’t care about the status of other projects. 20 people, 3 minutes apiece. After you deliver your three minutes of status, what are you supposed to do with yourself for 57 minutes?

Of course we all brought our laptops, both to relieve the tedium and to prevent the meetings from being an absolute waste of time. (20 people x 5 hours per week = 100 person-hours per week wasted in these timsuck meetings).

If laptops proliferate at your meetings, ask yourself honestly whether you are wasting people’s time. Better yet, ask the meeting participants. Do an anonymous survey if you think they might not be honest with you face-to-face.

…that the first thing people jump on is “Instead of banning laptops/smartphones/chairs/indoor heating, try making the meeting shorter/more relevant/more interesting/a catered affair?”

Maybe the weekly inter-departmental meeting has been reworked to minimize time and improve focus, but people are clinging to the old habit of “crap, it’s time for the weekly meeting; I’ll just bring my laptop and crank on email when nothing is going on”. The “topless” meeting can be used to drive attention to making the new format for the meeting work.

Life is not black-and-white; there are a combination of factors that lead to non-productive, boring, useless meetings, and many of them have two legs and wear clothing. I can’t make a meeting interesting or effective for you. It takes buy-in from everyone.

I banned laptops from my weekly staff meetings and actually caught shit for it today. I even caught a couple of people sneaking time with their Palms and iPhones.

I think there are two sides to this story.

Like one of the posters above, the fact that people are on their laptops and PDAs during a meeting means that the meeting isn’t engaging them fully. That’s no surprise since meetings have a very low information / time ratio per person.

I think there are two things that need to happen.

1. The person running the meeting has to help ensure that the meeting engages the minds of the people in the meeting as much as possible.

In return, the participants of the meeting have to do what they can to make the meeting productive by paying attention, shutting up when they have nothing worth saying, and saying what is worth saying as briefly as possible.

All of the other good meeting rules apply:

Don’t have a meeting unless it is absolutely necessary.

Have a clear agenda and goal for the meeting.

Stick to a preset meeting duration.

Cut off and “take off line” people who can’t shut up.

If someone is running a meeting according to good meeting practices, they have the right to ban laptops and pdas to ensure those who attended are engaged. They owe it to everyone else in the room.

Nice headline.

No laptop in a meeting? I hate taking notes with pen and paper.

I’ll agree with the above posters who say this is a symptom of a problem. Meetings are generally poorly run, wander off-topic, and go far too long. The meeting organizer who sees more and more people doing something else in their meeting would be wise to trim the fat from their meeting and get the participants in the room involved.

I’d be all for meetings without laptops, so long as the meetings themselves became more productive, or if meeting organizers were more clear about who needed to be there and who is optional — or if they would arrange the meeting so that the decisions requiring the most people were at the beginning, then people were allowed to leave. Or even if non-attendance was viewed as consent for group decisions.

Consider what Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority Shareholder for SEMCO (one of the most democratic companies ever founded) instead:

“All our meetings are on a voluntary basis. Because if it’s getting boring, go…If no one’s left, do we really need to do this?”

Point is, if the meeting is worth listening to, you don’t need to ban laptops.

I think I want to follow this up. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I’ve rarely been in a good meeting and I think I want to find out from others the ins and outs of good meetings. I’ll post something in the forums if anyone wants to continue the discussion.

Thanks!

There is a more fundamental issue operating here. Meetings are for human interaction. Every human in the room must discipline himself to pay attention to the other humans and shut out the non-human distractions. It's just common decency.