I often feel exhausted after an 1 hour online meeting with more than 3 people in a way that a real-life one wouldn't make me feel. We don't have lots of long meetings but sometimes we meet with the whole team (8 people) for 1h-2h. What's your experience in this regard? How do permanent remote workers or the ones who aspire to this status cope with Zoom fatigue? #remotework #wfh #zoomfatigue #burnout #workfromhome
I have about 5 hours of meetings a day, and they rarely require my participation
Isn't this the same issues as in person meetings? Meetings are exhausting.
It's not the same, at least not for me. In-person meetings may be exhausting but for different reasons. There's a thing with online meetings that make them more stressful.
I go downstairs for a walk to clear my head. 10 min walk for every 1 hour on a video call is a good ratio for me. No back to back video call for over one hour if I can help it.
I say fk you and never turn on camera. So much less stressful. Camera makes you feel like you’ve to be starting continuously at it all the time which you don’t usually do in real meetings. Also most of our engineers and PMs never use cameras. It’s the meetings with people from sales teams or PMMs or biz devs who turn on camera. I felt bad and turned mine on first few times. But now, I’m like fk u -if you’re blabbering on useless things in the meeting, I’m not gonna stare at your face, I rather watch TikTok on the side
I think we should all turn off the cameras and just have the conversations. The fatigue is significantly less. I had Skype audio conferences at my previous employer and it was less exhausting than at my current employer where we use Zoom video calls.
Well, in my case if at least I see some reactions from my colleagues it's a bit better. If all I do is talk and listen after some time I feel like I need to take a break. I've read once that the reason of this tiredness might be the lack of non-verbal communication. We subconsciously perceive less reward if we address the group without seeing their reactions. Whatever the real reason one thing's for sure: real-life meetings are way less demanding from a cognitive standpoint.
There is one redeeming thing about the cameras, which is that we can see people's lips move. A big thing if you're speaking and listening to a foreign language all day.