Attention, please!

People can be irritating at work. Very irritating indeed at times.

We could get into a debate about whether others are intrinsically irritating or whether it's more a question of how we react to them. I'll leave that to the psychologists. Meanwhile, here's a list of seven office habits that I find particularly irritating:

• When people work on their computers while you are talking to them on the phone.
• When people work on their computers while you are talking to them in person.
• When people answer the phone while you are in a meeting in their office and then talk for ages.
• When people say they will come and see you in five minutes but don't appear for ages.
• When people allow others to walk in and interrupt meetings you are having with them.
• When people send you an e-mail asking you to call them but then aren't there to take the call.
• When people spend their time in meetings reading e-mails on their BlackBerrys/iPhones, etc.
  

The embarrassing thing about this list is that I know I am guilty of six of the habits. (I do not answer the phone and hold a conversation when I am in a meeting with someone else. At most, I answer and say I will call back.)

Particularly irritating is reading e-mails during meetings — especially for those participants who don't have a company BlackBerry or whatever. It is like saying: "I'm important, you're not, and I'm not listening anyway."

At boardroom level, presumably everyone who wants such an executive toy has one. But there is still a good argument for banning them during meetings, as was put forward this week in the Financial Times by David Beatty and J Mark Weber from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Beatty and Weber argue that, if directors are playing with their executive toys, then they are not paying full attention during meetings and this may "represent a breach of their fiduciary duties to shareholders".

Note: the argument here is not that using toys in meetings is irritating but that managers who do so are "dedicating scarce resources [their attention] to something other than that for which shareholders are paying".

Beatty and Weber argue that firms should declare to shareholders and others that they have a "no wireless device" policy in meetings. And that those who do not have such a policy should explain why not.

Let the debate begin.