I recently attended an important meeting where the host asked everybody to turn off their phones and computers. The objective was to insure everyone paid attention. The problem was that everyone was reduced to taking notes with pen and paper. Half the people had no pen and half had no paper. Result almost no one took any notes.
Roll forward two days. Gentleman is giving someone advice on a complex subject. One of the attendees starts taking notes on their smart phone. Another attendee asks the person to stop texting and pay attention. When it was pointed out that it was note taking and not texting everyone was noticeably pleased.
We need new rules of behavior but dictating those rules will not work. Perhaps we should trust people to pay attention to what is important and perhaps just discourage multi-tasking. Multi-tasking has been shown to reduce productivity and effectiveness.
Another point. When everyone is ignoring the speaker it is the speaker's fault.
I was tempted to put in a link to explain "pen and paper", but I will refrain.
