Hello Reader,

Open the attendee list on your next call.

Count how many of the names on it are people.

I did that recently, on a session I was hosting. Seven names. Two of them were software. One of those was the name of a person who hadn't come, sent politely in their place to take the notes.

I felt something small and unflattering about that.

Then I looked further down the list and found my own notetaker sitting there, exactly like theirs. It has been in every call I run for months. I had stopped seeing it.

So my irritation had nothing to do with anyone outsourcing their attention. They had just done it where I could see.

And it made me think about my own behavior in this changing world. And whether you half-listen when you know someone else is taking notes.

Because the recording is getting better. But the listening gets worse.

So I started digging a bit deeper.

​Jian Wang published work this year on what happens when we hand our thinking over to our devices. The interesting part is what he did not find. Offloading did no damage on its own. The outcome depended on whether people still believed they were doing the thinking. Keep that, and the tool helped. Lose it, and it didn't

The other piece is bigger. Dvori Saluk, Guy Itzchakov and their colleagues ran five studies on what good listening does to the person being listened to. Attention, understanding, and something close to warmth (if you've heard me speak at a conference or event, you'll know I often talk about warmth). And here's something interesting: being listened to well by someone who disagreed with you beat being half-listened to by someone who agreed.

So, let's go back to our amazing tools and AI assistants. A transcript can record every word of a conversation. It cannot do one thing on that list to the person talking.

I think about the leaders I coach who can't figure out why their one-on-ones feel flat, even though their notes have never been more thorough.

So here are two to try this week.

Option A: Go into your next meeting with nothing running. Pick one conversation, no capture, no second screen. Afterward, write down what you remember. What you kept without help is a fair measure of how present you were.

Option B: Read your last three sets of notes. Ask what the other person would have needed to hear from you to feel heard. Then check whether you said it.

I am turning mine off for the conversations that matter most and keeping it for the ones that are genuinely just logistics. I suspect deciding which is which will be the uncomfortable part.

So how many of the people in your calls this week actually had your attention?

- Megan