About a year ago John had the smart realization that when laptops and PDAs are at meetings participants were less focused and meetings took longer to complete.

So he proposed a no-laptops-at-meeting policy which has been a huge improvement. Meetings stay far more focused and end on-time or early far more often. Of course laptops are needed at some meetings, but they are used to help the meeting, not offer distraction from it. Honestly, if you are too busy to be fully engaged at a meeting, it’s not worth being there.

Last week Jeremy Zawodney
wrote a blog entry on the appearance of no-laptop meetings at Yahoo!. I chimed in on the comments about how successful it’s been for us only to be contacted by a journalist wanting to know more.

The article came out last week in the San Jose Merc and it turns out we’re part of a trend that the author was unable to find anyone the found fault with. No surprise the folks at Adaptive Path already had the catchy name for it of “topless meetings” (They coined “Ajax” too).

Here are some quotes by John that went in the article.

Dogster.com and Catster.com, decided to cut the cord about a year ago. The decision was in keeping with its philosophy of creating a collaborative culture, said company co-founder John Vars.

“You can tell meetings go quicker and there is also just a shared experience. People are communicating better, the flow is faster.”

Update: the Modestos Bee ran the article too.