"I can listen and do something else"

Meetings and calls are where many people do their most confident juggling. You're on a video call with your camera off, clearing email while someone presents. In a meeting room you have the laptop open, half following the discussion while you finish a slide. It feels efficient, since you don't need to speak for most of it, and an hour of email gets done that would otherwise have waited.

Listening to speech and reading or writing text both use language, and chapter 3 applies with full force. You can't follow a spoken argument and compose a written sentence at the same moment. You alternate. You attend to the email, and the meeting becomes a murmur. A word catches your ear, often your own name, and you surface and try to reconstruct what was just said from the last few seconds. Then you go under again.

There's a classroom study that measured the result. Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas Cepeda had students attend a lecture in a simulated classroom and take a test on it afterwards. Some were asked to do unrelated tasks on a laptop during the lecture. They scored lower on the test than those who didn't. The researchers also looked at students who weren't multitasking but could see the screen of someone who was. Those students scored lower too. The researchers' conclusion was that a laptop used this way distracts the people around it as well as its user.

Apply that to your meetings. If you half attend, you come out with a partial and unreliable record of what was decided. You may then ask a question that was answered twenty minutes ago, or miss the action that was assigned to you. If you're in the room with a laptop open, the Sana study suggests you're also degrading the meeting for the people next to you. And the email you wrote during it was written with half your attention, which tends to show.

The honest question to ask is whether you need to be in the meeting at all. If you can clear your inbox through an hour's meeting and miss nothing that matters, then you weren't needed there. That's worth acting on. Ask for the notes and skip the meeting, or attend only for the item that concerns you. Most organisations have too many meetings with too many people in them, and the most useful response is to go to fewer. Sitting through all of them half present doesn't help anyone.

If you do need to be there, be there. Close the laptop, or keep it open only for notes. Meetings where people are paying attention tend to be shorter, because things don't need saying twice. It's also noticed when someone is fully present in a meeting, and it's less common than it used to be.

The same goes for phone calls taken while typing. The person on the other end can usually hear it. They hear the pauses and the slightly late "mm", and then you ask them something they've just told you.