What Are You Doing to Connect More Effectively?

This week’s question relates to how you are connecting with the people who are closest and most important to you: your family, friends, colleagues and – yes – your customers. In this era of technological hype in which text messaging, email, Twitter, and Facebook seem to take precedence over a face to face conversation or even a phone call, I’m wondering how effective these connections really are for maintaining and nurturing your most important personal and professional relationships.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert reflected on this issue in a recent column titled “Tweet Less, Kiss More.”  Herbert described an engagement party that a friend attended. “She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and plenty of Champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cellphones on the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire event. Enough already with this hyperactive behavior, this techno-tyranny and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and take a deep breath.”

Later in the column, Herbert goes on to say “I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes. Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little time just being ourselves.”

With Bob Herbert’s column as inspiration, I would like to learn about the most important personal and professional connections in your life. How are they going? Are today’s remarkable tools enhancing your connection or placing greater distance between you and those most important to you? In short, what are you doing to connect more effectively?