The New Year’s Resolution Weekly Update
Every day was long, but the break was short. This seems to be the consensus opinion of the holidays. Almost everyone also commented on how nice it was to Zoom much less. Maybe a bit with friends and family, but not the onslaught of more and less useful meetings.
I think we’re all familiar with the tiredness or burnout associated with overusing virtual platforms of communication. Not just for work, but to stay connected to friends and family, work out, taking workshops, talking to your therapist/wine retailer (six of one…).
You’re not alone. A survey by Buffalo 7 revealed that more than 75% of respondents who work from home found video calling made them more anxious than telephone calls and nearly half of them said it was worse than face-to-face meetings. The biggest triggers were:
Dealing with technology problems
Being unable to read the caller’s body language during a video call
Feeling like you’re being unheard
Having too many people to focus on
Worrying about how you look in front of the camera.
Zoom fatigue is not new. Some people have been tired of the format since the late 1960s when the heads-in-squares were America’s favourite family.
Let’s fix this together by making a resolution for the new year to help each other minimize Zoom fatigue. There are four simple things we can do:
Take breaks between meetings. Give yourself a minimum of 10 minutes between Zoom calls to reset and (gasp) make sure you’re ready for the next one. And if you’re the host, end your meeting at 10 minutes to the hour.
Turn off your video self-view. Research shows that when you’re on video, you tend to spend the most time gazing at your own face and gestures. “Not me” you protest. Well, have you ever said to yourself, “Do I really look like this?” Aha! You’ve been looking at your own image on Zoom. Consider turning off your self-view camera, which you can do in your Zoom video settings or by clicking on your picture during a meeting. When we have our video turned off, we are better able to focus on those that are speaking.
Hold the maximum number of people in a meeting to 6. If you don’t, you’ll lose their attention and they’ll start multi-tasking. It’s easy to think that you can use the opportunity to do more in less time, but research shows that trying to do multiple things at once cuts into performance and is less productive (about 40%) in the long run. The rough math is that when you have 8 people in a meeting, the collective loss of productivity is about 3 people’s worth of attention. You might as well have invited 5.
Don’t Zoom. Phone people instead. You can move around, make a coffee, browse the fridge, grab five minutes of sunshine, all while being able to better concentrate on what they are saying. This is probably the best advice of all.
Many people hate looking at themselves in pictures. There’s a reason for this that Zoom can help alleviate. Our faces aren’t symmetrical (which is very closely associated with beauty), but we get used to looking at ourselves in the mirror. So when we see ourselves in pictures, it is the opposite of mirror view and we don’t like what we see because it is less familiar. Zoom has a feature where you can switch to mirror view. If you must keep self-view on, this might be more comfortable. Unless, of course, you don’t like what you see in the mirror in the first place. We can’t help with that.
(We had a colleague who periodically would show up at the office with a basket of the most delicious muffins. (Those were the days.) When we asked her why she went to all that work, she replied that she didn’t like what she saw in the mirror that morning, so she made muffins to make everyone else in the office fat. It worked.)
Zoom fatigue is not new. Some people have been tired of the format since the late 1960s when the heads-in-squares were America’s favourite family.
Bacon Cheddar Muffins. Deadly. Recipe here.
And with this, we’ll end the update 10 minutes early.
Stay safe. Stay resilient.