In my experience, it is more distracted. When someone is deep in the mental zone of authoring an email, or caught up in an IM chat, and I just need to ask them if they agree with a technical decision or not, they are definitely too distracted to be effective.
| Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Yes, that is definitely human nature - but it's far easier (IMO) to get someone's attention from a daydream than it is from a screen of blinking notifications.
| What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office.
I disagree. There are times and places for meetings. Sure, frequent meetings are painful and need to be culled back, but there are just times that you need to sit down with real people and talk through something.
In my experience, it is more distracted. When someone is deep in the mental zone of authoring an email, or caught up in an IM chat, and I just need to ask them if they agree with a technical decision or not, they are definitely too distracted to be effective.
| Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Yes, that is definitely human nature - but it's far easier (IMO) to get someone's attention from a daydream than it is from a screen of blinking notifications.
| What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office.
I disagree. There are times and places for meetings. Sure, frequent meetings are painful and need to be culled back, but there are just times that you need to sit down with real people and talk through something.