When someone’s telling you something that matters, give them your eyes, not your screen’s leftovers.

Partial attention is worse than none, and the person talking can always tell. What reaches you through the corner of your focus is the information without the weight, and what they receive back is the sense that whatever they are carrying was not worth putting the phone down for. Nobody says this at the time. They just stop telling you things.

When someone starts on something that matters, turn the screen face down where they can see you do it. It takes a second and it changes the whole conversation. You can pick it back up when they have finished.