“I hate conference calls,” Dean admitted to me on a break during a recent session I was facilitating.  “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to focus during them.” 

As part of a select group of leaders chosen for a high potential program at a global food company, Dean was a bit sheepish about his conference call behavior.

The Rationalization:

“I know that I shouldn’t multi-task while on them, but I’m on so many conference calls every day that I need to use the time to get other things done.” 

Dean described how he tried to tune into the parts of the conversations that were relevant to him and tune out the rest, so that he could catch up on emails or do expense reports. 

He admitted, though, that his approach doesn’t always work.  “At least a couple of times a month, I find I’ll get distracted by what I’m doing and then hear a colleague say, ‘Dean?  Dean, are you there?’  It is pretty embarrassing because it’s obvious I just got caught not paying attention.”

Has this ever happened to you?

The Diagnosis:

There is little doubt that our attention is under siege.  We know that more than two billion emails are sent everyday and sometimes it feels like they all end up in our own inboxes!

More often than not, we aren’t even aware that we are failing to make intentional decisions about where we are putting our attention. Instead, we shift our focus reactively—to the newest shiny metal object that catches our eye.  This can be especially true on conference calls when you can multi-task in the privacy of your own office.

I shared with Dean that we are incapable of keeping our minds on two separate tasks at the same time, so it was no wonder his attempts at conference call multi-tasking weren’t working.

Current research supports the idea that multi-tasking is a myth—and when we split our attention, we work slower and retain less.  Part of the problem as well is that none of us have a large amount of “working memory”.  That is the short-term memory that we access to help us navigate any given moment. 

In Distracted, Maggie Jackson cites research demonstrating that people remember significantly fewer facts about a television news story when there is a crawl running beneath it. Our working memory just doesn’t have the capacity to hold both the story and the crawl, so we end up losing parts of both. 

In addition, when we try to do more than one thing at once, we lose the complexity, the depth, and the nuance of our work and our communication.

The Ritual:

Dean was open to changing his behavior on conference calls and we designed some rituals to help him foster absorbed focus.  He decided to turn off his email during conference calls and put his Blackberry in the desk drawer to minimize the temptation to look or respond to the incoming messages.  He also opted to sit in a chair in the corner of his office rather than at his desk to help him pay closer attention to the conversation rather than the piles of papers on his desk.  Lastly, he decided to take notes of what was being said on the call—with a pen and paper. 

When I followed up with Dean a few weeks later on a coaching call, I was interested to hear about the effect of his conference call rituals. 

“These small changes in my behavior have made all the difference in the world!” he exclaimed.  “By turning off my email and moving to a different part of my office, I automatically am able to focus more. I’ve found that taking notes has been incredibly helpful. Writing it down helps me process things more thoroughly.” 

Dean said these behaviors made him more efficient because he did not have to go back to his colleagues to clarify things or to redo expense reports when he wasn’t really paying attention. 

“Folks have even been ribbing me that they no longer have to call my name during conference calls to get my opinion,” Dean added. “I’m right there with them!”

Reflecting on your own conference call behavior, are there some of Dean’s rituals that you could adopt to improve your own absorbed focus?