Present In The Room

There’s a line of thinking I keep coming back to: the idea that time isn’t wasted by what you’re doing, but by whether you’re actually there for it.

You can spend an hour doing something meaningful—important work, a real conversation, time with someone you love—and still have wasted that hour. Not because the activity was wrong, but because you weren’t present for it. Your body was there, but your mind was elsewhere. The hour passed, and you weren’t really in it.

This is different from the obvious ways we waste time: scrolling, procrastinating, or avoiding hard things. Those are visible, and we beat ourselves up about them. But there’s a subtler drain that’s harder to see which is all the hours we’re technically present but actually absent. We’re at dinner, but mentally replaying a conversation from earlier. Or in a meeting, but three meetings ahead in our minds. With our kids, but composing an email we’ll send later.

The moment appears, it passes. We weren’t there for it.

The Disappearing Frame

Imagine life as a series of frames, each appearing and vanishing instantly.

If your attention is on the current frame—if you’re actually there for it—then you experienced that moment. You were alive to it. But if your mind was elsewhere—stuck on a past frame, anxious about a future one, running some internal simulation—then you missed it. The frame passed and you weren’t watching.

This isn’t about productivity or optimization. It’s closer to a question about being alive. How many of the moments you’re given do you actually experience? How many pass while you’re mentally somewhere else?

I catch myself doing this. In conversations, I’ve not listened—I’m preparing my response. In meetings, I’ve not been present—I’m thinking about the next thing, or the last thing, or something unrelated entirely. I’m attending my own life without being present for it.

The math is uncomfortable. If I spend even half my waking hours with my mind somewhere other than where my body is, I’m not living half my life. I’m just persisting through it, surviving the moments rather than experiencing them.

Why This Is Hard

The mind’s default mode is absence. Left to itself, it drifts to the past (regret, rumination, replaying) or the future (anxiety, planning, rehearsing). It runs simulations. It composes responses. It worries. It rarely just stays here, now.

I wouldn’t say this is a flaw, exactly. The ability to mentally time-travel is part of what makes us human. We can learn from the past and prepare for the future in ways other animals can’t. But the cost is that we’re rarely where we actually are. The present moment—the only one that’s real—becomes just a waystation between mental destinations.

I notice this most in contexts that should demand presence. Moments that matter, passing while I’m elsewhere. There’s research on this. Studies on mind-wandering find that people’s minds are not on what they’re doing about 47% of the time. And the finding that keeps surfacing: mind-wandering correlates with unhappiness. Not because daydreaming is bad, but because not being where you are has a cost.

Attendance Versus Presence

Attendance is showing up. Being in the room, having the meeting on your calendar and your body in the chair. Presence is actually being there for it, with your attention on what’s happening. Mind and body in the same place.

Most of life, I think, is attended rather than experienced. We show up for the hours we’re given without really being there for them. The moment happens, we’re somewhere else, it’s gone.

This shows up in my facilitation work with leadership teams. I’ll see or hear about meetings where everyone is technically present but attention is fragmented, or people waiting for their agenda item, mentally running their own department, rehearsing what they’ll say when it’s their turn. The conversation becomes a series of parallel monologues. People talk past each other because no one is actually listening—they’re just waiting to speak.

Google’s research on team effectiveness found that the highest-performing teams had roughly equal conversational turn-taking. MIT’s work on collective intelligence found similar patterns—high-performing groups were distinguished by social sensitivity and responsiveness. But both of these require actual presence. Listening that’s real listening, not just silence while you load your response.

The leadership team context matters to me professionally. But I don’t think this is fundamentally a work problem. It’s a human problem. The gap between attendance and presence runs through everything.

No Clean Answer

I don’t have a fix for this.

I’ve tried various things. Meditation helps, sometimes. So does the simple act of noticing—catching myself when my mind has drifted and gently bringing it back. There’s a question I ask at the start of important sessions: “What would need to be true for you to be fully here for the next few hours?” Sometimes just naming the distractions creates a little more space. Morning pages have probably been the most recent addition to the toolbox that have made a significant difference here.

But mostly, I just keep losing presence and finding it again. It’s not a skill I’ve mastered. It’s more like a practice I keep failing at, noticing the failure, and returning to. I think there is value in even noticing this: I can say for certain that I spent years wandering through work and life not realizing this. How many important moments or conversations were you a part of where the memories are fleeting?

What I’m more confident about is that this matters. Not in a productivity sense—though there are productivity implications—but in a deeper sense. The question of whether you’re actually present for the life you’re living feels like one of the important questions.

Each moment appears and vanishes. If you’re not there for it, you missed it. Not metaphorically—literally. That moment is gone and you weren’t in it.

How much of your life do you want to actually be there for?

I keep asking myself that, because the question itself seems to help. It pulls me back, sometimes, from wherever my mind has wandered to. Back to here, back to now, back to the only moment that’s actually happening.