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Zoom fatigue unpacked

leadership.garden

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Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#81

Post by sureglymop »

politelemon wrote: post #45
GravelRocks wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this too. I usually cycle through a few people if multiple people have their camera on. I also take snips and draw mustaches/glasses/graffiti on them in paint during really boring meetings.

It would be hilarious if you suddenly or accidentally shared the screen with that artwork ongoing

Something like this recently happened in one of my university classes. We had a remote class in the evening on Teams. One of my buddies felt very tired so he thought he'll zone out for a bit and mute the call. After he proceeded to mute the call he realized that he'd actually muted the teacher for the whole class. It was hilarious, especially when he told me after. :)

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#82

Post by esafak »

marcinzm wrote: post #69
turnsout wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Scrum "stand-ups" reciting the Scrum updates in a Word document.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#83

Post by rightbyte »

noman-land wrote: post #16
ehnto wrote: post #9

I turn my camera off on big calls and it helps a bunch, there's a process running in the back of my mind when it's on that is constantly screening what I am doing just incase it looks stupid on camera. It feels like being in a panopticon. You never know if someone is looking. It's very tiring. I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context…

I want you and everyone else to know that sometimes on large zoom calls I will "pin" one person in the call and stare at them for multiple minutes in a row on fullscreen. I do this all the time.

Hah. I wouldn't say that it is creepy but I get a bit uneasy thinking about it. Ok so I judge people on what they have in their basket in the store. I am not a greater person.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#84

Post by skinner_ »

throwaway23v3n wrote: post #31

I avoid all of this by not owning a webcam. I don't have video of me broadcasting because I simply can't, and nobody ever questions it because they don't really care as it's a non-essential component. I do make heavy use of visual aids & other screen sharing, so that people can look at what we are discussing, not me.

My Macbook Pro's webcam went wrong in 2020. I haven't had it fixed yet, because I hate Zoom video. Nobody ever complains.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#85

Post by helij »

skirmish wrote: post #72
croutonwagon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You say no to them. I have a standing time reserved for school run. People regularly book stuff over it. I reject the meeting automatically. If I have 'busy' in my calendar because I don't want to be disturbed I first take a look what this new invite is and then decide on the spot with no or yes (no being the dominant response). Slowly over time people learn to email or Slack you with a few dates and times and life is good.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#86

Post by tiffanyh »

esafak wrote: post #80
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.

That’s much easier said if you work for a startup.

But if you work for either a large organization or a company that’s been around for decades, you influencing that kind of change (across departments you don’t own) is virtually impossible unless you’re the CEO. And even then, extremely difficult.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#87

Post by FalconSensei »

the_snooze wrote: post #64
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.

I already usually have a difficult time jumping in on discussions in person. Zoom is SO much worse. This week I had wanted to point out that I already added a link with examples on something two folks were talking about on a doc, and after 5 minutes, I used the 'raise hand' feature, waited another 5, then just interrupted them because there was just no break to jump in, and no one noticed the raise-hand

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#88

Post by watwut »

esafak wrote: post #80
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.

I would not call it lowering the bar. People were always vad at writing. It is more of not raising the expectations too much.

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#89

Post by FalconSensei »

skirmish wrote: post #72
croutonwagon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

if you have time booked on your calendar, no matter what it is, it's safe to assume anything else put on top is going to be declined, because you already have something scheduled.

You can add a regular meeting for yourself too, instead of focus time, also set your calendar not to share meetings' details with other folks, so they will only see 'busy'

Re: Zoom fatigue unpacked

#90

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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