Steve Occasionally Runs Errands During Virtual Meetings

The Hidden Cost of Running Errands During Virtual Meetings: Why Steve’s Habit Hurts More Than He Thinks

Steve is on a video call, his camera on, nodding at the speaker. To an outside observer, he appears engaged. But in reality, his attention is fractured. In one browser tab, the meeting plays; in another, he’s comparing prices for a new vacuum cleaner. His phone is propped beside his laptop, flashing with a text from his spouse about dinner plans. Steve is occasionally running errands during virtual meetings, a behavior so common it’s become a quiet pandemic-era norm. This seemingly harmless multitasking is a silent productivity killer, eroding meeting effectiveness, damaging professional relationships, and undermining the very flexibility that remote work promises. Understanding the cognitive and social fallout of this habit is the first step toward reclaiming focus and respect in our digital workspaces.

The Psychology Behind the Errand: Why We Multitask in Meetings

The urge to handle personal tasks during work meetings isn't purely about laziness or disrespect. It stems from a complex interplay of cognitive overload, meeting fatigue, and the unique environment of remote work.

The Myth of Multitasking Proficiency: The human brain does not truly multitask on complex cognitive tasks. What we call multitasking is rapid task-switching. Each time Steve shifts his focus from the meeting discussion to his grocery list, his brain undergoes a "switch cost." It takes time to disengage from one task, reorient to the new one, and then re-engage with the original task. These seconds of lost context accumulate, meaning Steve retains only fragments of the meeting’s content. He might hear the words "Q3 projections" but miss the critical caveat about a supply chain issue because his mind was on which brand of coffee to buy.

Meeting Fatigue and the Search for Stimulation: Back-to-back virtual meetings are cognitively draining. The constant self-monitoring of one’s own video image, the lag in conversational turn-taking, and the lack of physical movement create a unique form of exhaustion. When a meeting feels irrelevant, overly long, or poorly facilitated, the brain craves a more stimulating or rewarding task. Checking a personal errand—something with immediate, tangible results (like booking a dentist appointment)—provides a dopamine hit that the abstract meeting discussion cannot. This creates a reinforcing cycle: the meeting feels boring, so Steve seeks stimulation elsewhere, which in turn makes the meeting even less engaging because he’s now mentally absent.

The Blurring of Boundaries: Remote work demolished the physical firewall between "office" and "home." For Steve, the desk where he works is also the command center for his personal life. The laundry needs folding, the dog needs walking, a package needs tracking. The proximity of these tasks makes them feel more urgent and accessible than a meeting whose relevance he might question. The convenience of handling them without leaving his workstation is a powerful temptation, normalizing the behavior in his own mind as efficient time management rather than a breach of professional conduct.

The Ripple Effect: Consequences of Divided Attention

Steve might feel he’s being productive by "killing two birds with one stone." In reality, he’s creating multiple problems for himself, his team, and the organization’s goals.

• Erosion of Personal Productivity & Learning: The most direct victim is Steve’s own work. He misses action items, misunderstands decisions, and fails to contribute meaningfully to discussions. This forces him to ask clarifying questions later, wasting colleagues' time. Furthermore, he misses out on the ambient learning that happens in meetings—the context, the unspoken concerns, the strategic thinking—stunting his professional growth.
• Damage to Trust and Professional Reputation: Colleagues notice. When Steve is asked a direct question and fumbles, or when his follow-up emails show a clear gap in understanding, his credibility takes a hit. Repeatedly, he is perceived as disengaged, disrespectful, or simply not a team player. This perception can stall career advancement, as trust is the currency of leadership and collaboration.
• Degradation of Team Dynamics and Meeting Culture: One person’s multitasking can legitimize it for others. If the meeting leader sees

...that behavior, it signals that full engagement is optional. This erodes the meeting’s collective efficacy. Participants start speaking over one another less, as no one is truly listening. Decisions become superficial, as critical scrutiny wanes. The meeting transforms from a collaborative forum into a series of disjointed monologues performed for an audience of distracted minds. Over time, this culture of partial attention becomes the norm, making it nearly impossible to have the deep, focused discussions that complex problems require.

Organizational Cost: At scale, this phenomenon cripples strategic execution. Projects stall because key stakeholders weren’t fully present to align on dependencies. Innovation suffers, as creative friction requires sustained, undivided thought. The organization’s collective intelligence—its ability to synthesize information and solve problems—is systematically undermined. What appears to be an individual time-saving tactic becomes a massive drain on organizational coherence and output.

Rebuilding the Focused Workforce

Addressing this requires acknowledging that the problem is systemic, not merely a matter of personal discipline. Solutions must target both environment and culture.

Leaders must first redefine meeting hygiene: enforce strict agendas with clear outcomes, mandate cameras on for core discussions to foster accountability, and ruthlessly cancel or shorten meetings that lack a compelling purpose. They must model engaged behavior, explicitly asking for input and noticing disengagement without shaming, but by resetting the group’s focus.

Organizations must also re-sanctify deep work. This means institutionalizing "focus hours" where meetings are banned, and encouraging communication via asynchronous documents (like shared briefs) that allow for thoughtful review without the pressure of real-time performance. The goal is to make synchronous time genuinely valuable and asynchronous time genuinely protected.

Finally, individuals must re-establish personal rituals that create psychological separation. This could be a pre-work commute simulation (a walk around the block), a dedicated workspace that is left at the end of the day, or a shutdown ritual that signals the end of "work mode." These rituals help rebuild the mental firewall that remote work demolished, making the switch between professional and personal focus intentional rather than accidental.

Conclusion

The temptation to multitask during remote meetings is a symptom of a deeper misalignment: between the cognitive demands of meaningful collaboration and the fragmented, convenience-driven reality of home-based work. While a single checked-off personal errand might feel like a win for Steve, the cumulative cost is a erosion of trust, a degradation of team intelligence, and a stagnant organizational culture. The path forward isn't about stronger willpower, but about smarter structures and deliberate rituals that make focused attention not just a professional expectation, but a supported and sustainable practice. Reclaiming our attention is the first step toward reclaiming the true potential of remote and hybrid work.

This erosion of collective focus doesn’t just diminish meeting efficacy; it quietly dismantles the very foundation of organizational learning. When team members consistently divide their attention, they fail to absorb the nuanced context, emotional cues, and implicit assumptions that are the lifeblood of collaborative problem-solving. The subtle tensions, the hesitant pauses before a breakthrough idea, the shared laughter that builds rapport—these micro-moments of human connection and cognitive synchronization are lost. Over time, this creates a shared reality deficit, where departments operate on slightly different versions of "what we agreed," leading to duplicated efforts, strategic misalignment, and a pervasive sense of working at cross-purposes. The organization becomes a collection of isolated nodes, each processing information in a vacuum, rather than a coherent network capable of emergent intelligence.

Therefore, the investment in focused work structures is not a nostalgic return to pre-pandemic norms, but a strategic upgrade for the cognitive age. It recognizes that human attention is the scarcest and most valuable resource in the modern economy. Protecting it is not a perk; it is a core operational discipline. Companies that master this will find their teams more innovative, decisions more sound, and culture more resilient. They will convert synchronous time from a transactional update into a generative forum for synthesis, and asynchronous time from a fragmented inbox into a space for deliberate, high-quality contribution.

In a world saturated with notifications and endless digital demands, the ability to command unified, undivided attention may become the ultimate competitive advantage. It is the difference between an organization that merely processes information and one that truly thinks. The choice is clear: we can continue to fragment our collective mind in the name of convenience, or we can consciously rebuild the architectures of attention that allow our deepest human capacities—to listen, to connect, to create—to flourish once more. The future of work will be defined not by where we log in from, but by how well we can think together.