How rude! Bad office behaviour we`re all guilty of

Cecille Hansen works with a great guy who has an extremely irritating habit. Whenever someone speaks to the account executive, he makes a "hurry up" motion with his hand, winding his wrist as if to say, "Hurry up. Get to the point, already."

"He didn't even know he did it until someone brought it to his attention," says Hansen, a records manager for an insurance broker in Bellevue, Wash. "He's the nicest guy. He just goes at a higher speed than most of us."

Hansen's generous view of her colleague's rude behavior is due, in part, to her awareness of her own sins: She often fails to look at people when speaking with them, and is sometimes mortified to realize she has carried on an entire conversation with co-workers without even glancing up from her computer screen.

"I just get focused on what I'm doing and an 'interruption'- i.e., a human being who needs to talk with me - gets only a portion of my attention," she says.

Quiz: How Rude Are You At Work?

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In offices across America, good people are engaging in some extremely obnoxious behavior: talking over each other in meetings, failing to respond to e-mails, showing up late to appointments or blowing them off entirely with a hurried text message. What gives?

Psychiatrist Edward M Hallowell, MD, says that the issue isn't that the human species is devolving into ill-mannered automatons. Rather, the accelerated pace of office life has us made us lose touch with common courtesies once taken for granted, like saying, "Good morning."

"We don't have a sudden epidemic of rudeness," says Hallowell, the author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! "It's just that without meaning to we have allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed."

Your Brain on Tech

Hallowell says that much of the problem can be attributed to our relationship with technology, and the unrelenting stream of incoming information - from e-mails and IMs to cellphones and texts - that it offers. In order to cope, we screen things out. And all too frequently, it's the people around us who don't make the cut.

Technology, of course, was supposed to make life easier and give us more time. And it does enable us to do many things more quickly than before: type documents, send invoices, find out the year "Surfing Safari" made the Billboard Top 100 (1962). But there is a price. It has also created an expectation that all tasks can be accomplished as quickly as it takes to check a Wikipedia page.

The problem is our brains aren't wired any differently than they were 30 years ago, and tasks that require concentration and creativity (say, writing a Beach Boys song) take the same amount of time that they always did.

"The brain hasn't changed," says Hallowell. "We still can only handle so much. But we're asking our brains to process exponentially more data points than we ever have before in human history, and that mental energy has to come from somewhere."

Unfortunately, human relationships are often the casualties of this mental exhaustion. We have so much to do and so much information to process that we don't even realise we are interrupting each other, failing to listen, subtly or not-so-subtly saying, "Hurry up. Get to the point, already."

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