ThemeEngagement & energy
CardCard 9 of 63
Questions5 to explore

Distractions

Avoid busy environments, noise & notifications

Distractions are not a sign of disrespect online; they are the default state, and designing against them is part of your job.

Every participant in your session is sitting next to a phone, an email inbox, a second browser tab, and possibly a family member or a dog. In a shared room, social presence keeps people at the table. On a screen, no one can see what else is open, and the pull of other things is constant.

Reducing distractions is partly the participants' job and partly yours. You can ask people to close other windows and silence notifications. You can also design the session so that there is rarely a stretch where someone has nothing to do but watch. Active participation crowds out passive drifting.

Online, specificallyIn a physical room, the social cost of visibly drifting keeps most people present; online, that cost disappears, so the session design itself has to do the work.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Set norms early

At the start, ask participants to close non-essential tabs, silence phone notifications, and find a quieter spot if they can. Naming this aloud normalises it without singling anyone out.

Keep people doing things

Good facilitators design for active participation rather than passive watching: type in chat, vote on a poll, move a card on the board. When people have something to do, the competing tabs lose.

Shorten the passive stretches

Keep any stretch where one person is talking and everyone else is listening to under ten minutes. After that, give people something to respond to, even a quick chat prompt.

Name the environment ask

Send a short note before the session asking participants to prepare their space: headphones on, notifications off, a glass of water nearby. People who have set up deliberately are more present from the start.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Have you told participants in advance what kind of environment and setup you are expecting?
Which parts of your session ask people to passively watch for more than ten minutes, and can you break those up?
How will you know if someone has drifted, and what will you do when you notice?
Are there points in your agenda where a phone is genuinely needed, and have you accounted for that?
What is your plan if a participant is clearly in a very noisy or unsuitable environment?

What trips people up online

Asking people to close distractions once at the start is not enough; the design of the session needs to keep pulling them back in throughout.
Facilitators who talk for long uninterrupted stretches are the biggest source of drift, more than any notification.
Some participants are joining from open offices or shared homes and cannot control their environment much; factor that into your expectations.