31–40 of 130 posts
What can a person do to make Zoom calls less exhausting for themselves? I would be happy to hear any tips.
I like that Teams added the option to hide your self-view. Even if you don't focus on it, just having a slightly delayed mirror copy of yourself in the corner of the screen is mildly distracting. It feels more natural talking to a group of people that doesn't include yourself.
It's a weird notion that experiences only are real when they show up in brain scans.
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I absolutely hate calls. WFH works well when you just need to grind out something solo, but it’s awful to communicate. Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.
I absolutely love calls, you don't have to type and you have the other person's (relatively) undivided attention. Plus cajoling, browbeating and instigating techniques work better and if called out you can put things down to 'tonal misunderstanding.' Also a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally. When you actually talk to the…
We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads. A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation. I did…
I always found the audio on phone calls awful. In addition, I cannot see who is on the call, there is no indicator who is speaking, no visual cues who is getting ready to step in. No ability to read the room because you cannot see anyone. It's just awful.
Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
It's a weird notion that experiences only are real when they show up in brain scans.
We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads. A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation. I did…
The biggest thing that leads to this, I think, is bad audio. Listening to shitty scratchy laptop microphones -- or even the comparatively-excellent Apple array microphones -- is deeply fatiguing. I notice a distinct difference in energy expended when I'm on a call with people who have low/zero background noise and decent-quality microphones, and others have noted that about me (as I'm also an audio engineer in my spa…
I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.
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I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.
Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.
A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.
Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.