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My friend, Breena, sent me this spot-on article from Yahoo! Tech yesterday. This conversation needs to be had often and deeply right now.

Mobile technology is so handy and it does make you feel more connected. The question is, connected to what? And is that where you want to be connected? Is it really serving your overall REAL, conscious goals in your life? I mean, even the professional ones? If you were to ask yourself what really matters to you… what you want your life and work to have been about, is moving your attention from the breathing flesh-and-blood human sitting with you to check your Blackberry/iPhone/cell phone every few minutes  in service of those goals?

I have a Blackberry and I know how compelling that little flashing light is (even when you turn off the sound indicator). But I also know this: I cannot be truly attending completely to the person I am with when I am checking, even ever-so-quickly, my email/text messages. Even “ever-so-quickly” isn't as quick as we think since research shows that it takes 64 seconds to attend to an email interruption then get back to the task at hand. That doesn't include responding to or even reading the email – that's just the attention/distraction part. That's over a minute of missing whatever conversation/energetic exchange you were having before the interruption. This certainly doesn't serve my productivity goals.

Plus, seriously, how vacuous does the connection feel, almost immediately, when you watch the person with whom you were – just a moment ago – sharing real time and space connection, shift attention and energy to their mobile device? It's a crappy feeling.

It really is about respecting our goals, commitments, and the people we are actually sharing breathing space with in any given moment. Step away from the technology and make a real connection.