Stay focused or stay available?

I’ve noticed that when I meet someone for coffee or lunch, they behave in one of two ways:

1. Ignore their phone/watch and stay engaged with me.
2. Look at every notification and apologize when they need to respond quickly.

I also see some of this from the other side:

1. Some people are hard to reach when they’re out.
2. Some are able to respond no matter what the situation.

It’s a matter of deciding what’s important. I certainly hate to not respond to people while I’m in the middle of a meeting, but it’s almost always the right thing to do. If two of us are going to take time out of our day to meet, it’s worth focusing 100% on the meeting.

Do I want people to get my attention or do I want people to be able to keep my attention?

There are exceptions, of course. I’ve seen a few times over the years where we’ll sit down and the other person says “Our system crashed this morning, so I may need to take a quick call from my IT person in a few minutes“. Things happen, and that’s fine.

Uber

While I strive to be the kind of person that stays 100% focused on the person I’m with, I’ve struggled at times over the years. One small shift I make from time to time is to take Uber/Lyft to and from some of those meetings. This has two big advantages:

• Before I start the meeting, I’ve had ~15 minutes in the car to stay on top of emails/texts to make sure all is in good shape.
• If something were to come up during the meeting, I know I’ll have some time in the car (not driving) to respond on the way back.

In addition, mostly in larger settings, you can create the appearance of not paying attention if you’re looking at your phone instead of paying attention to the speaker (which is partly why I use a writing tablet for situations like that). I was at an event a few years ago where the speaker called out someone in the room for playing on their phone during the talk, and it turned out that the guy was taking notes on it! This exception aside, simply being on your phone tends to signal that you’re not really paying attention.

If you’re reading this and wonder if I’m talking about you specifically, I’m almost certainly not. The last year or two has been full of great meetings, and the inattentive behavior seems to be fading away, but it’s always something that I’ll be working to improve for myself.