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Zoom fatigue unpacked

leadership.garden

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Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#61

Post by peterangular »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #48
cubefox wrote: post #44

One thing I also noticed is that good audio quality really improves things. Even if the current audio quality doesn't consciously register as bad, low quality leads to much more exhaustion over a longer period of time. This can be observed when someone switches from a bad internal laptop mic to a high quality headset. The voice is so much more easy to listen to.

It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth. And also wired Jabra headsets that inexplicably still sound like Bluetooth. No more tin can sound, no more dropped words when someone starts talking. Yes, even an internal mic is better in this regard, though it will have problems with echo cancellation.

> It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth

In addition to audio quality, people have _constant_ problems with their audio setup across all platforms when using Bluetooth. I've gotten to the point where I will just outright buy someone a plain USB mic just so I can consistently get them on a call without 10 minutes of fumbling audio interfaces.

Unfortunately, even after buying them a USB mic + explicitly banning Bluetooth on calls I still catch devs trying to use their fancy Bluetooth gaming headset (or whatever) which can easily push meeting start times back by 5-10 minutes.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#62

Post by the_snooze »

What kills me is the problems with audio and its effects on conversational engagement. Online calls are laggy, and participants aren't all on the same volume level. It's incredibly frustrating when I speak and someone says that my volume is low, so I should repeat myself. And the lag makes turn-taking very unnatural---in meatspace conversations, people interrupt each other and cede the floor all the time. You can't do that in a Zoom call.

Taken together, Zoom is a deeply frustrating experience because the limitations of the technology get in the way of having normal human conversations. It looks like it should work, but it doesn't.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#63

Post by neilv »

bee_rider wrote: post #14

The perspective mismatch between desktop and laptop users can be a bit funny, laptop users tend to be close to the screen, so they take up their cameras’ full field of view. Blown up on a big desktop screen it is like they are right in your face. It really can feel uncomfortably intimate, as silly as that sounds! Luckily my monitor was on an arm, so I could do one setup for Zoom, one for meetings.

I want to figure out a better way to do this. (The worst was when my extreme closeup was combined with some remote conference room that put videoconf people up on large wall displays. So, besides the larger-than-life HD pore inspection, it might've seemed I was glowering down upon them from above.)

I use a laptop on a "lectern" standing desk that gets wheeled around for natural light, etc.

I already use a corded USB camera, but if I put it on an arm rather than on top of laptop, there's even more eye contact disconnect from the laptop display.

I probably have to get a big external monitor, so that I can be looking at it from greater distance. Which I'd guess means either a fixed location for videoconf (the monitor is in a fixed location, whether or not my standing desk is), or a much larger standing desk to wheel around.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#64

Post by the_snooze »

cameldrv wrote: post #29

One other thing not mentioned is latency. Zoom does a good job with this, but there are fundamental limits. This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person. This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The c…

I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land.

My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#65

Post by RadiozRadioz »

the_snooze wrote: post #62

What kills me is the problems with audio and its effects on conversational engagement. Online calls are laggy, and participants aren't all on the same volume level. It's incredibly frustrating when I speak and someone says that my volume is low, so I should repeat myself. And the lag makes turn-taking very unnatural---in meatspace conversations, people interrupt each other and cede the floor all the time. You can't d…

I got used to platforms like TeamSpeak where everybody had individual volume sliders. It was excellent. Whatever Zoom does to automatically adjust everyone's volume is a poor replacement and it leads to exactly the issue you describe. Sure it's cheaper than sending out a bunch of individual audio streams or doing multiple transcodes server-side, but we've lost a lot of flexibility. I'd quite like P2P systems like Jitsi to bridge the gap.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#66

Post by drozycki »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #53
codingdave wrote: post #10

Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It is…

Agreed it is the weirdest thing ever to me that people don't email anymore. Just send an email. In an email it's written down and I can search for it. In an email I can think at my own pace and respond without worrying about trampling others. In an email people can't ramble on and on and if they do you can just not read the email. And if it's work to be done, just make a ticket. The amount of meeting time waste baffl…

I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants. Someone on the inside needs to know to forward the whole thread to anyone who needs the information after the fact. This info is lost forever when participants leave the company. With Slack I can search through conversations where the participants are long gone. It is not the end all be all of communication, but the auto-documentation aspect is way improved over email.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#67

Post by MengerSponge »

janosdebugs wrote: post #24
codingdave wrote: post #10

Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It is…

This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?

None of us is as dumb as all of us

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#68

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

verytrivial wrote: post #50
symfoniq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this. I’m strongly considering leaving a job primarily due to the meeting culture. It’s just incredibly wasteful. We can spend weeks talking about things I would have knocked out in days in a previous role.

Robustly challenge what you think are unwarranted meetings. Preface your input in meetings that are silly but still exist with "Hi, I'll keep this concise because I know everyone has a lot of work to do ...", make a habit of reconfirming the value and purpose of the remaining meetings. Make it normal for meetings to whither quickly when not vital. I go further and simply don't attend meetings that lack an agenda or a…

I was complaining about this to my manager, he said attending meetings doesn't affect my perf and I just shouldn't go if I think it's pointless. So I stopped going to a couple. No one has made a peep. I need to start voicing for the smaller meetings tho. I've starting asking the groups "any agenda for today?" A couple hours before but I feel like the meeting organizer should really be on top of this.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#69

Post by marcinzm »

turnsout wrote: post #36
tiffanyh wrote: post #34

Less meetings / more async isn’t always the best answer. Most people are terrible at written communication, and much better at spoken (which makes sense since most speak more than write). So even though it’s terribly unfortunate, for the masses, more times than not - meetings have a total net-gain effect vs async written.

Yeah the answer is actually MORE meetings which are shorter and have 5 or fewer participants. I can’t tell you how many 1 hour meetings I’ve sat through with 20 people, only 2 of whom are talking.

I "love" meetings where they just recite word for word cells from an Excel spreadsheet for an hour.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#70

Post by clolege »

I read over the pandemic that dogs are hyper-sensitive to space [1], and I believe that humans are too. Much more than we're aware.

And while bad internet connections, mics, webcams, etc all contribute to a less enjoyable time collaborating with colleagues, I believe they are all trumped by the fact that video conference absolutely shatters the evolutionary understanding we have of space, and how to navigate it to interact with others.

This is why audio-only calls feel so much better. It's basically just like talking to your friends at a sleepover with the lights out. It's not quite the same because you can't get closer or further from specific individuals, but for smaller groups it works pretty well.

But when we turn video feeds on, things get very strange. Zoom puts everyone into the same exact chair, staring at a mirror where they can see everyone else in the reflection.

This makes it seem like everyone is staring directly at you. And they are very close, sometimes even in your lap.

Keith Johnstone's book Impro says a whole lot about space, including:

> If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they're likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don't move they'll begin to feel love or hate as their 'space' streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they'll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they'll move back so that the force isn't so powerful. High-status players (like high-status seagulls) will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating one-self are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it's such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil.

All this is to say that I believe that the Vision Pro has a lot of potential to be a game-changer for remote conferencing. It's focus on "spatial computing" makes it so that we can flex those evolutionary muscles around space again.

[1] Let Dogs be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete. Great book

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