Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Technology - the great enabler?

If you are reading this post, you are the intended audience for this post. My guess about you is that you pride yourself on your relative command of all things technical. You probably have a 1 (or more) mobile phones, blackberry, etc.... Now let me ask you a question - does all the tech at your command really make you any more productive?

This article while a little dated, shines a light just how bad our situation is becomming. We become so connected to our devices that we forget to connect to PEOPLE. Honestly, how many of you can honestly say that our ubiquitous technology has not diverted your attention away at times. Heck, I confess here that part of this blog was authored during a meeting! C'mon, admit it - you have done this sort of thing too. You probably sat in at least one meeting today fiddling with your crackberry, texting someone or reading e-mail on some other device. Worse yet, many of you probably did these things at home and instead of connecting withyour family, you connected to everything else.... that is really sad.

The way we are living isn't living at all. Yes, I know that the pace of work is what presses us to be so connected, but perhaps this is more the case of us failing to manage expectations than failing to manage our work. What if we all just stopped being connected all the time. What if we turned off the crackberry, the cell phone and the pc and actually listened to the people around us for a change?


YOUR MISSION:

Disconnect from all of your devices during every meeting today. Dont check e-mail, dont answer your phone, dont do anything but listen and actively participate in whatever meetings you have today. You'll get more out of the meeting, and so will those you meet with!

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