Dear Colleague, Put the Notebook Down

Dear colleague,

I am the best, most innovative and most efficient human you are likely to ever encounter. I have yet to do the research, but my gut tells me that empirical evidence would surely prove that my organizational and note-taking methods are universally and uniformly the best for all human beings living on this planet. As such, I judge my subordinates not on their performance or their contributions to the team, but rather by their ability to recognize the unquestionable brilliance of All The Things That I Do. While I stand here waiting for you to fetch your laptop (by the way, next week we are switching to iPads - NO MINIS!), I will post an insightful essay to my extremely valuable blog explaining my frustration with people who mistakenly believe that any human being anywhere would not be better off if he just tried harder to emulate me.

You may now commence agreeing with me,

Your Team Manager

Dear Colleague,

Put the laptop/smartphone down. I'd rather you paid attention to the meeting instead of checking email/evernote/facebook. Even if you had the best intentions of taking notes for this meeting, I know how insidious notifications and instant updates can be. If you need to record a few items from this meeting you could jot a few notes down on a paper notebook. If I need to communicate something that is not easy to write down, like a long URL, I will make sure to email it to the meeting invite list, or even add it to the meeting description in our calendar.

And don't worry. I am not so self-important to assume that every nugget of information that I relate in this meeting needs to be captured immediately in some electronic vault of knowledge.

Last I checked, you could also scan paper into Evernote. Sending emails to the person in the meeting will still work, even if they have pen and paper with them.