The Multitasking Myth

If you want to achieve extraordinary things, slow down! It's faster.

One of my friends and clients is a powerful CEO, a talented and born leader. He is a passionate and colourful man – but I wouldn’t call him patient! He has an extraordinary record of success in running very complex and successful businesses. However, his staff meetings always left something to be desired. They were long, ineffective, and tedious. Everybody was there in body, but often they were somewhere else in spirit, attending to other conversations, texting and emailing throughout the meetings.

Increasingly, the members of his leadership team were becoming frustrated about the lack of productivity of these meetings. There were a few false starts – attempts to banish computers, PDAs, and phones from meetings – but they never stuck. The CEO himself was the worst offender, chairing meetings while responding to emails and distracted from the matters at hand.

The members of his leadership team finally mustered the courage to confront him one day, when their frustration boiled over. They told him how concerned they were about the diminishing effectiveness of the meetings and their decreasing productivity. They gave him examples of decisions not fully executed and deadlines not rigorously met because people were not focused at the meetings – or because they hadn’t attended at all, sending “sit-ins” instead. The situation had reached the point where people no longer saw the meetings as critical, but rather just as a nuisance.

That day, everything changed. The CEO issued an edict: no more fiddling with laptops and wireless devices at meetings, in order to have the full attention of his people while they were together. He had become convinced that they would accomplish much more if they gave each other their undivided attention.

They all turned off their wireless devices and participated, even though being “disconnected,” even for an hour, made some of them – and especially the CEO – fidgety. The quality of the meetings shot up immediately. They became more enjoyable, more productive – and shorter!