The Meeting Trap
A meeting is running. You are in it, but not really. The inbox is open, an email is being answered, a document is being read. You listen with half an ear, just in case something relevant comes up.
I know this especially from team meetings where everyone reported on something completely different. A kind of catch-all for tasks, where your own topic comes up briefly and the rest has nothing to do with your actual work.
The obvious assumption is: you do two things at once, both get a bit worse, but overall it’s faster.
That is not how it works.
The side task you actively focus on often barely suffers. An email written with full attention is a good email. The meeting, on the other hand, you lose almost completely. You miss maybe eighty percent of it. And you usually only notice when someone addresses you directly and you have to ask them to repeat the question.
At first, that is uncomfortable. Over time, you get used to it and become more confident: you openly say you were dealing with something else and ask for a repeat. The meeting itself does not get any better because of this. If anything, it gets longer, because of the repetition.
This has a name: Continuous Partial Attention, or CPA. The term was coined in 1998 by Linda Stone, a former executive at Apple and Microsoft, and later described in outlets including the Harvard Business Review.
The key difference to classic multitasking: multitasking, according to Stone, is a conscious choice made to be more productive. CPA, by contrast, is automatic and driven by a different need entirely, namely staying constantly connected, being a “live node on the network”, as Stone puts it. You continuously scan your surroundings so you don’t miss anything.
This is essentially the behavioral layer of what we described as FOMO in the first part of this series. The fear of missing something does not make you pay attention in the meeting. It makes you be half in the meeting and half everywhere else.
And when not just one person but the majority of the room operates this way, it changes the substance of the meeting itself. Nobody is really listening. Contributions often come from people who just tuned back in and don’t have the full context, a dynamic we already described in part three of this series. The meeting gets louder, but not better.
The honest consequence: a meeting where the majority is half-listening has already lost its purpose, no matter how good the minutes look afterwards.
The better solution is not to ban multitasking. That doesn’t work anyway. It lies in taking the core question from part three seriously: who actually needs to be in the room?
If someone is sitting in a meeting because their topic comes up briefly and the rest does not concern them, CPA is not a personal weakness. It is a rational response to a poorly assembled group. The alternative would be to bring that person in specifically for the relevant point, or to clarify the question afterwards if the work can continue without an immediate answer.
Meetings where nobody is really listening are not a side issue. They are a signal that the composition is wrong.
Stone, L. (2007). Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention. Harvard Business Review (associated blog post, concept originally from 1998). lindastone.net
In many companies, this is exactly where unnecessary time losses and structural problems arise. Often this goes unnoticed for a long time — until projects start to stall.
