If your mind is occupied with extraneous thoughts your attention is not fully with the person in front of you. Even if they do not call you on it, they will notice and keep coming back again and again trying to get through to you. As with children, you can handle a situation in five seconds or five hours - the only difference is your level of presence when you do it. So the secret to productivity is to handle things exactly the way you would with a child. Drop distractions, focus your attention, handle one item at a time and move on to the next project.
Presence increases the personal connection between people.
In fact, without presence, there is no personal connection at all. When your guests have a complaint or when members of your staff have a question what they want most is to feel that you really heard what they had to say. Most people do not expect you to resolve their every concern on the spot, but they want to sense that what they had to say was important to you. Just as a distracted state of mind creates irritation, presence makes people feel more positive. The feeling of being served is really a function of presence.