malvasia bianca

Back in the pre-pandemic days, I basically had three options as to how to pay attention in meetings. One was to close my laptop, and actively participate. The second was to leave my laptop open, and try to not be distracted by stuff on there too much. And the third was to leave my laptop closed but to look at my phone beneath the table.

The first is, of course, the best option if my goal is to pay attention; but if I wasn’t actively participating, it wasn’t particularly easy. The second didn’t work very well; way too easy to switch over to Slack or email or whatever and then realize that I had no idea what had happened in the meeting for the last five minutes. The third option, honestly, worked better than the second, as long as I was doing something like playing a puzzle game or reviewing Japanese vocabulary. (If I’m reading Twitter, then it’s just as bad as the second option.) I won’t say that the third option is a great choice, and I probably did it too often, but it’s not bad for meetings that are mostly informational but where the information is important enough for me to want to attend the meeting.

In Zoom times, though, this changes. Having your laptop closed isn’t really an option: that’s where the Zoom screen is! So it’s way too easy to slip between option 1 and option 2. I try to use turning my camera on as a signal to myself that I’m trying to be following option 1; not sure if that helps or not.

But one surprise to me has been that there’s a fourth option, and it’s actually a good one. Early on in the pandemic, I realized that, if I didn’t move around more, my body would get actively unhappy. One solution to that problem was to get in the habit of going on a walk at some point during the day (and, actually, I can imagine taking Zoom calls on walks working well, I just don’t have experience with that), but another one was to go through the set of Silk Reeling Exercises that I’ve learned in my Tai Chi course. You can think of these as a set of stretches; that’s not really quite accurate, but it’s good enough for purposes of this post, and the details of what they are doesn’t matter.

At any rate, I started doing those exercises during meetings that I really did want to pay attention to but where I wasn’t actively participating enough to make it easy to avoid being distracted. My back was noticeably happier once I started doing them, but also, it had the huge advantage of keeping me physically away from my laptop / iPad.

And it turns out to work really well as a means to help me focus. Yes, I am paying attention to what my body is doing as part of the Silk Reeling Exercises, my body isn’t on complete autopilot there. But I’m not paying a ton of attention to those exercises, and the parts of my brain that are paying attention to my body are different enough from the parts of my brain that are paying attention to the meeting that the latter still work quite well. In particular, the verbal parts of my brain only have one thing to pay attention to; and it probably also helps that I slip fairly easily into a semi-meditative mindset when doing the Silk Reeling Exercises, which helps me focus on whatever is going on, including the meeting that I’m listening to.

So: try exercising during meetings! Honestly, part of me thinks I should turn my camera on while I’m doing this, just to normalize it among my coworkers. I’m actually not a big fan of working from home, but this is one part of working from home that works well; it’s a lot harder to surreptitiously exercise during a meeting if you’re in a meeting room with a bunch of other people…