CON TEXT:  I'll be there. What time?Easy, tiger. It's not that kind of meeting. They're called topless meetings, but I can assure you that everyone attending will keep their shirts on.

In today's non-stop business world, workers are bringing their laptops everywhere - on to the bus, into the bathroom, and even into the meeting room. It's not unusual to see a roomful of employees with their heads stuck in their laptops while the boss struggles vainly to get their attention, so many companies are tackling the problem by calling for topless meetings at which laptops are left outside the door.

In California's Silicon Valley, home of Google, Yahoo and Apple, employees are being urged to leave their laptops on their desks while attending meetings, so they can give their full attention to the boss's scintillating chat and stimulating ideas.

"If someone is typing away while you're trying to talk, you're not getting those natural human signals to see if someone is interested or understands or is even listening," says John Vars, of pet-networking website Dogster. Tired of meetings being interrupted by a menagerie of electronic sounds, the company banned its staff from bringing electronic devices into meetings, and found that the meetings ran more smoothly and efficiently.

It's not just laptops that are being excluded from the meeting room. Mobile phones, BlackBerries, Game Boys, Enigma machines, anything that can distract from the discussion at hand, are being discouraged. Instead, employees are getting the chance to experience the reality of human interaction, and feel the joy of actually knowing what's going on at meetings. When people spend meetings checking their texts and e-mails, they're in a state of "continuous partial attention", with the result that the meetings are less productive.

"If you're multi-tasking, no matter how good you are, you're still half-ignoring someone else," said one expert.

So who came up with this bright idea to go topless?

Todd Wilkins, of web company Adaptive Path, was one of the first to call a topless meeting. Frustrated by his tuned-out staff, who seemed to be permanently wired up to their electronic devices, Wilkins decided to ban laptops, mobile phones and "crackberries" from meetings. His colleague, Dan Saffer, came up with the term "topless meeting".

"We looked around and saw everyone on their laptops, so, as a joke, said this meeting should be laptop-less," Saffer said. The term proved so popular that Saffer went on to develop his list of rules for topless meetings. Among the top tips are: announce early that a meeting is topless, so staff can prepare themselves; limit topless meetings to a maximum of one hour, to avoid withdrawal symptoms; and if you can't go topless, don't go to the meeting at all.

Try at work:

"All right, which joker called a naked meeting?"

Try at home:

"Okay, kids, no computer games, iPhones or Tamagotchis at the dinner table - and no topless jokes either!"