Technical opinionMultitasking with laptops during meetings

For what purposes do people use their laptops during meetings? Recent press articles and academic studies describe a pervasive tendency to use computers for multiple purposes during lectures and workplace meetings. Participants may use their laptops to take notes in electronic format, follow presentation slides at their own pace, or look up related information on the Internet while the meeting is in progress to enhance their acquisition and processing of information. 1 These are compliant uses because they are related to the meeting's objectives. Participants, however, may use their laptops to handle email, play computer games, or review unrelated documents. These are distracting uses because they indicate deviation from the meeting's objectives. Since computers allow users to engage in more than one task concurrently, participants' laptop use during meetings may combine compliant and distracting uses. A better understanding of the prevailing nature of computer-based multitasking in the context of professional meetings is necessary. Such understanding would help establish effective management responses to control multitasking and leverage it for the purposes of the meeting. It will also inform current debates over multitask-ing's appropriateness in terms of social mores and its efficacy in terms of performance implications. Multitasking consists of performing at least two tasks at the same time. Our research interest lies with computer based multitasking behavior that occurs in a face-to-face (F2F) meeting context, particularly on assessing compliant and distracting uses in such context. Thus, the purpose of this study is to empirically examine the type and level of computer-based multitasking activity for a group of subjects who attend face-to-face meetings. Based on Wasson, 6 we expect that participants' computer-based multitasking levels would vary across meeting activities as mediated by attention requirements (Figure 1). We collected objective data from computer monitoring logs of laptop-equipped participants who were attending lecture meetings of an undergraduate interdisciplinary core course at a small private business college. Since the focus of the study is on computer-based multitasking, we concentrate our analyses on subjects who were using their laptops for multiple concurrent uses, rather than those who chose not to use their laptops. A monitoring program was installed on the laptops of the subjects who agreed to participate. The software unobtrusively logged computer use only during each 80-minute session of the course. Laptop usage outside the lecture period was not logged by the software. Recording occurred in stealth mode, and the log file was periodically copied …