Buzz off: Fixing mobile’s interruption culture

I did it again: I reached for my smartphone. I’m sitting at my laptop, winding down from the day, and catching up on my to-do list. I have all my feeds up in different windows, and I actually reached for my phone. It is lying next to the computer, face down, not on purpose but because that’s how I put it down. It is a Pavlovian response.

The phone vibrated — and not one of those wimpy buzzes. It’s sitting on a 60-year-old pine wood desk, so it resonates strongly against the hard wood surface. I reach for it, even knowing that if I look around on my screen in front of me I can probably see what set it off. There’s a satisfaction as I pick it up and check the notifications. The endorphins fire in my brain: Someone has reached out.

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For many people, it’s a status symbol to reach for the smartphone. “You are important, someone wants you!” You can be sitting and talking to someone, and it takes real willpower not to glance at the phone when it buzzes. “Don’t these other people know I’m important — someone needs something from me!” It doesn’t matter that you were in the middle of an important conversation or there are 10 other people around the table with you. You reach for it anyway and start typing away. A response is necessary. It has to be immediate, etiquette be damned. If Miss Manners were actually dead (she’s alive and kicking), she’d be rolling over in her grave.

The real question is whether this behavior is something we should be giving into. None of us has an issue with surfing the Web on our own time or sending a tweet or checking Facebook during a lull in the day. Yet there is a certain amount of disdain and even anger when it happens to you.

You know how meetings start these days. It’s the first thing said: “Please turn your phone to vibrate or off.” There’s always someone in the room who forgets to do it or believes he or she is too important for the directive to apply. That person can’t wait until the air in the room is alive with his or her latest ringtone. Maybe it’s Pitbull or Beyoncé that shatters the calm of the room.

Sometimes that person shoots you the “oops, sorry, I thought I had it set on vibrate” look while reaching into the pocket and flicking the smartphone’s switch to vibrate. Other times, the person steps out of the room — that person’s business is more important than this meeting. Only you know it isn’t an emergency call; it’s a way of asserting importance. (In perhaps an overreaction, I’ve been know to replace such an obnoxious person’s current ringtone when he or she isn’t paying attention with either Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” or Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”)

Let’s not forget those people who put their smartphones on vibrate, then place them on the conference room table next to their laptops or tablets. It’s the old passive-aggressive “let’s make a louder noise when the phone vibrates against the table and interrupts everyone.” Then there is the other type of person, who turns the smartphone to silent mode but responds every time the face of the phone lights up with a notification.

Where has civility gone? It’s gotten so bad that people now play the restaurant check game. Everyone puts his or her smartphone in the middle of the table, and the first one to grab his or hers during the meal is responsible for the check. Yet, this very rarely stops people from picking up the smartphone during the meal. The endorphin rush is too much.

How many times have you reached into your pocket to check your smartphone because you felt that phantom vibration? You know the one, where you leave the smartphone in your car or on your desk, yet you still feel it vibrate. The look on your face as you try and cover up the fact that your smartphone isn’t in your pocket even though you felt it go off is priceless. But it doesn’t stop you from doing it again five minutes later.

I talked about this phenomenon with a group of people on Twitter recently; we chatted about how you teach etiquette. Do you have rules as a business? My boss always had a rule that no laptops could be open during a meeting. That quickly morphed to the rule that they could only be open if you were using it to take notes, and he reserved the right to check that was what you were in fact doing. But how do you do that when everyone has a smartphone or a tablet?

Let’s be fair: I spent some of my time in the enterprise running a help desk and providing third-level support. There was a time I didn’t have a choice but answer the phone or the two-way pager. It’s an awfully hard habit to break. In fact, my younger daughter has been known to put her foot down and demand I give her my smartphone during dinner. If I remember, I try and leave it in the other room. I have also set up special ringtones and vibration patterns for family, so I can distinguish who’s calling. (No, the family’s ringtone isn’t Carly Rae Jepsen, although my youngest is making a ringtone for me that says, “Daddy, pick up the phone, c’mon Daddy, pick it up already, you slowpoke!”)

You can’t just tell people what you want them to do; instead you have to demonstrate and model the behaviors. You need a culture of etiquette at every level of the organization. But as much as it is a culture of etiquette, it’s a culture of respect. And you have to give some to get some. I can’t expect the people who work for me not to check their devices while I’m talking to them if I do the same thing to them.

That doesn’t mean you never answer the phone or check it — there could be an emergency, but that situation isn’t the norm. The etiquette has to be based on common sense: Smartphones don’t sit on the table. You make meetings short, and you invite only the appropriate people. Your conference calls don’t have 50 people attending them. If the meeting or call really isn’t a goof use of their time, people will do other things when they can during them. Why put them in that position?

In the meantime, my smartphone just went off again. I really need to see who it is.

This article, “Buzz off: Fixing mobile’s interruption culture,” originally appeared at A Screw’s Loose and is republished at InfoWorld.com with permission (© Brian Katz). Read more of Brian Katz’s The Squeaky Wheel blog at InfoWorld.com or at A Screw’s Loose. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.