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Zoom fatigue unpacked

leadership.garden

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Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#71

Post by evolve2k »

shortcake27 wrote: post #30
dtx1 wrote: post #8

The whole mirror fatique thing is really interesting. I get enormous social anxiety on virtual calls and am constantly checking my mirror. I hate teams for that reason, i can't properly see what I am transmitting while Google meet is showing me Exactly what I'm sending in HD. I think I'll have to experiment with removing that and see if it reduces my anxiety

It’s a catch 22 for me. When it’s there, I can’t stop looking at it to ensure I look ok. When it’s not there, I’m stressing because I don’t know how I look.

I feel like a halfway is needed. Maybe a virtual silhouette that shows my err blocking within the shot, while obscuring more detailed mirroring. Wonder if that would help.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#72

Post by skirmish »

croutonwagon wrote: post #33
fader wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried leaving 15 minute buffers in between meetings. All that happens is that my colleagues schedule 15 minute long meetings in the gaps. It's exhausting.

There’s a concept called defensive calendaring I would encourage you to look up. I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.

What do you do when people just blindly schedule meetings on top of your focus time?

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#73

Post by lelanthran »

MengerSponge wrote: post #67
janosdebugs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not all of us is as dumb as all of us, if catch my drift.

If someone wants to pay me $$$ to basically sleep with my eyes open, then that's on them. I'm smart enough to allow them.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#74

Post by xemoka »

drozycki wrote: post #66
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-documentatio…

I often thought a private, indexed, and archived, mailing list is best of both worlds. I’ve had trouble getting buy in though.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#75

Post by fnordpiglet »

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…

Sadly a lot of people don’t produce directly but do so indirectly. When they could been seen sitting at their desk clicking on something by everyone, everyone knew they were doing “something,” even though it was immeasurable (because it was often nothing). Without that ability to signal productivity they need to be seen in meetings on zoom. This isn’t fair of course, most jobs probably don’t legitimately have 8 hours of busy work attached but yet we expect them to work 8 hours. The jobs still important for the hours of actual work they put in. That’s not their fault, but they’re still left with figuring out how to seem like they’re working 8 hours when they are not and never were. The buying of their body in a chair was a proxy for that, and now they need to figure out how to make people see them sitting in a chair.

One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#76

Post by baxtr »

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…

Agree.

I'm shocked by how much some people despise email. "You still use email?" Yes, I do, and I believe it is really effective...

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#77

Post by mixmastamyk »

drozycki wrote: post #66
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-documentatio…

Until you stop paying. Not a good place to lock up communication. Zulip might work, but better to move to docs/wiki as needed.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#78

Post by ryanschneider »

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?

I think the problem is further compounded by team size and insistence on 40 hour work weeks. As soon as you have people on “manager schedule” that feel the need to look busy the number of meetings starts growing exponentially. I’m all for having enabling people on the team, just don’t expect them or anyone else to meet an arbitrary amount of hours per week quota.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#79

Post by neilv »

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…

Yes, I was working remotely for a decade, we were hyper-effective, and I'd only met 2 of the people in person once. Most communication was email, and there was the occasional phone call. So productive.

At another place, we used a text chat SaaS to be super-effective, and usually the only internal routine videoconf was for whole-company sync-up and personalizing. Text chat for effective async/real-time (in addition to docs), and occasional videoconf as needed. So productive.

I've also seen places where people did meetings because they didn't know how to collaborate effectively, and there were barriers to learning that. One of the places, it seemed meetings were approached much like they approached coding or documenting: being able to say you performed that proof-of-work was the end goal itself, rather than the meeting being costs invested smartly towards some actual shared goal.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#80

Post by esafak »

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.

We must stop constantly lowering the bar. Let them learn to write, or don't hire them in the first place. Communication skill is a good hiring criterion.
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