14 ms·

A theory of Zoom fatigue

232 points by longdefeat 7y ago

Legogris 7y ago
First time I've heard of this and it's not something I experience at all. I do not find video conferences more exhausting than in-person meetings - if anything maybe even the opposite. One factor than can make it more tiring is poor connectivity and audio to the point where it becomes an effort to interpret what others are saying/making oneself understood. Other than that I think it's just a matter of what one is accustomed to.
- woliveirajr 7y ago
  I have more freedom when I'm online that meeting in person. The few times online meetings are stressing, IMO, are the same that would make me mad in person: people who keep talking without allowing interventions, people who don't what to say and just pretend to say things, people who have bad latency (yes, that take some seconds before speaking)
- randallsquared 7y ago
  I also find meetings via Zoom less draining, in general, than in-person meetings. Maybe this is why: > This, too, amounts to a persistent expenditure of social and cognitive labor as I inadvertently mind my image as well as the images of the other participants. If I understand the author correctly, if they don't have a constant image of themselves presented to them, they aren't constantly processing how they look to others(!)? Well, in that case, I can see why Zoom would be more draining, but, you know, welcome to my world in any situation except when I'm alone or only with my SO.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fouc 7y ago
> having to remain relatively still in front of a camera If you video conference from your phone or laptop then you can move around.
crazygringo 7y ago
For one-on-one videoconferencing meetings with normal latency (e.g. within 3-4 time zones), I find zero fatigue or problems like this. The only "fatigue" I find is frustration when people are talking over each other or multiple people trying to jump in at the same time. This generally happens either when latency is bad (e.g. US-Japan), connections are bad generally (MS Office decides to auto-update in the background and saturate your download), or just when it's a particularly contentious meeting with lots of people trying to get a word in edgewise, and all the normal cues you use to figure out when to talk just aren't there. And the reasons for those all seem self-evident.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  A meeting that has a component of "go around the room and get everyone's input" is harder in Zoom. In a physical room, you go clockwise or counterclockwise. But on Zoom, when someone finishes talking, who knows who's supposed to go next?
  - evolve2k 7y ago
    We created a pattern that when they finish the speaker nominates who goes next, cuts a bunch of awkward lag from going around the circle. Maybe give that a try.
  - adenner 7y ago
    You need someone to serve as the facilitator for the meeting and call out the order.
    - cygned 7y ago
      And have ground rules established.
djsumdog 7y ago
I don't know about those theories. I suspect something else. Do you remember landlines, and how responsive they were? You would say things back and fourth and the conversation just worked, even on three-way and conference calls? There was very little noticeable lag! Even in the early cellphone days, I'd often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don't control the "over" / button press. Cellphones have gotten better, but they've never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn't notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It's really apparent if you're on a remote team and you're next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay. I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.
- StefanKarpinski 7y ago
  That and you’re constantly struggling to decipher audio and make yourself understood. Much like talking in a bar that’s too loud is exhausting. A lot of the exhaustion seems like it’s the difficulty of compensating for a high latency, low-bandwidth, low quality experience. We’re just not evolved for it—reality is the opposite of all of those things.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - fattire 7y ago
    This is it. The issue is exhaustion compensating for all the audio problems-- dogs barking, room echoes, compression, images out of sync, the delay in reactions (constantly being unsure if you were heard- not knowing what the correct volume you should be speaking is), being asked to repeat yourself, and the mix of your audio with those of others. It's a lot to process. With 15 people on "speakerphone", the audio is IMO the biggest and most taxing problem.
hvs 7y ago
Meetings are exhausting, Zoom or no Zoom. I’ve noticed no difference and I’m on at least 3/day.
renewiltord 7y ago
Do not feel this. I have a wireless headset so I'll occasionally mute my mic and do a couple of dumb-bell curls or go get some water while thinking. Feels fine, honestly. I like being present for the social comfort I get from physical proximity to people but the Zoom thing just has that absent, so I don't get that extra bonus but I still don't feel tired.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  You do curls on video?
  - ars 7y ago
    I'm not the person you replied to, but I never turn on my video.
    - mixonEPA 7y ago
      Do you ever feel pressured to turn it on when everyone else in the call has their video on? I know I do and it's something I need to work on cause I find myself more productive and engage with the camera off for myself.
      - hnzix 7y ago
        Turn the camera off after introductions, then only turn it back on when you want to make an important point or the convo is about a very specific work item related to you. If someone complains, you can say you don't want to clutter up the video feed or that you're having latency issues (also, they're a dick).
      - ars 7y ago
        I do sometimes feel that pressure, but my laptop is in a docking station, so the camera is not near me. And I have no motivation to get an external camera :)
  - renewiltord 7y ago
sudosteph 7y ago
Any other Autism Spectrum or ADHD people who feel less fatigued by video meetings compared to IRL? The things I like: - having the range of activity during a meeting constrained to one area in front of me so I don't have to look around the room to make sure I'm not missing something / get overstimulated by too much stuff happening. - Boxes with borders lighting up when someone is making noise / talking so I know where to look. - Names always associated with faces - text chat area for sharing links and non-disruptive ways to request clarification - No longer get lost in the hallway trying to find rooms with weird names - Don't have to kick people out of rooms when they stay too long - can foot tap and fidget hands off screen without people noticing
- mjayhn 7y ago
  My problem is I can't multitask during a zoom at all. I'm so anxious that someone will ask me a question so I'm tuned in the entire time while everyone else is pretty obviously off working on the side. I also find that I stare at myself fidgeting. It's nowhere near as bad as in person where I just want to not talk at all, though. Also if everyone is on different timezones please don't make us turn on webcams. I'm getting a lot of 7-8am meetings lately now that my team is mostly East of me. I'm just waking up. I was in meetings from 8am this morning. I showered at 2pm when I finally got a 30 minute break.
  - randycupertino 7y ago
    I'm a little bit vain, a bit of a narcissist and self-conscious. I find it very distracting on Zoom to be looking at my own face on video to ensure I look like I'm properly paying attention, showing my best angle (hiding a double chin!) and not fidgeting. Maybe I'm just too much in my own head about it, but it seems there's a bit of a performative element to zoom meetings making me a lot more award of presentation and perception than in irl meetings.
    - sudosteph 7y ago
      That makes total sense, most people don't make a habit of looking at themselves unless it's for the purposes of evaluating or adjusting something about their presentation. I tend to just make sure it's setup right when it starts, then use the option to hide the self-view to avoid that distraction. I don't care if I might look silly later, since constantly readjusting is a silliness of it's own. And someone will ping me if the camera messes up.
stainforth 7y ago
I was on a partially-remote team for years, with bi-weekly team conference calls - webcam was possible but we all never used it, not even the manager. Screenshare was used for presentations. But audio was enough. Why is everyone defaulting to video calls for things? It adds so much "noise" and cognitive load on things.
- intopieces 7y ago
  Some people miss seeing their colleagues' faces. I know I do.
  - slimed 7y ago
    You miss them. Not their faces.
    - mixonEPA 7y ago
      I mean for some people it is just their faces... Lol
    - touktouk 7y ago
      We can only assume that if the author of previous comment actually missed them and not their faces, they would have said so.
    - asdff 7y ago
      My personal happiness plummeted, anecdotally, when my coworkers started dropping the video feed one by one. It was surprising, but noticeable and significant.
      - intopieces 7y ago
        Same for me. There's just little things about interacting with a person face to face, personality aspects like how they express themselves: posture, eye movement, facial expression even. They just add to the interestingness of the work.
- 7y ago
lostdog 7y ago
Lots of normal things about human interaction are broken in Zoom meetings. * You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you. * You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person. * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant. * There's no sense of space. You can't look over at person if whomever is talking just teleports to the center of the screen. Or if the layout is fixed, sound isn't coming from anywhere in particular, so you need to search around for who's talking. And everyone on screen is looking a random direction.
- joegahona 7y ago
  Also inevitably the same 3 or 4 people join all the Zooms with their camera off, and mic off, which creates a disconnect. This is akin to showing up to an in-person meeting under a giant blanket, only the sound quality of someone talking from underneath a blanket is significantly better than Zoom.
- xioxox 7y ago
  In our (academic) meetings, people generally default to switching off their camera when there's more than a handful of participants. I find this much less stressful. I can also do some physical activity which helps concentration if I'm just listening.
  - kqr 7y ago
    It also puts a lot less pressure on the network connections involved when they aren't also loaded with 8 real-time video streams.
- dylan604 7y ago
  So why the fixation on a video call? I'm probably just an old curmudgeon, but to me the benefits do not out weigh the oddities being discussed. Everyone wearing their pieces of flair with their "personalized" backgrounds are tiresome. I can see the benefits of a screen share/presentation, but I really don't need to see the other people involved. I don't care about tone of voice. I get sarcasm. For the people that don't, then even if they can see them, the sarcasm isn't more/less because it's a video call. Video calls to me are just another version of "Hey look at me!!!! I'm special"
ken 7y ago
I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a quiet room. Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go. Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just to parse the audio into meaning. It’s exhausting. Cell phone calls are still pretty bad, too. Low bandwidth digital audio compression is just wretched.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  Could it be an issue with microphones or speaker quality? My fully remote team has used zoom for all of our meetings, and unless someone is calling in from a cell phone in a busy area, I don't recall a time when I have had difficulty understanding someone. If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who doesn't talk loud enough for the entire table to hear (which is sometimes me, because I have a very soft voice and struggle to speak loudly in big meetings).
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Not OP. Some people do have really terrible hardware. It would be good IMO if the software had an input quality indication. Or a test mode that does a loop test, play on speaker at end A, listen on mic A, play back mic A on speaker B, listen on mic B, analyse profile and reverse the test - "you may experience poor sound as B's microphone has a bad frequency profile" or something. The other thing that would be nice is if Win10 hadn't hidden the microphone level/gain controls.
  - ken 7y ago
    It’s possible, but then why is it $1000 smartphones are struggling with this, and $5 landline phones from 1993 did just fine? Did Apple skimp on audio hardware that bad? That’s a little hard to believe.
    - 7y ago
ryandrake 7y ago
“Kevin, you’re muted. Unmute and say that again, please” “Sara, your voice cut out for 30 seconds and we didn’t hear any of that, can you please repeat?” Two people talking: “Bfrhtxhlcyfoydoyd... oh, you go ahead” “no, you go ahead” “OK like I was saying, cofhlflydhlbdfykdjtxtc...” “Hang on, I think Kumar just disconnected. We need him to continue.” “Can someone text Kumar and see if he can rejoin?” “I can’t see more than five huge pixels of your presentation, Jan. Can you re-enable screen sharing?” Things that are exhausting and don’t happen during face to face meetings...
- smilespray 7y ago
  Yup, that's pretty much every videoconference meeting.
- hnzix 7y ago
  Or that one person who refuses to mute while typing loudly and sniffling and slurping their coffee and making wet sloppy mouth noises.
boltzmann_brain 7y ago
I dunno, for me it's better because I can space out and do other things instead of listening to useless conversations that inevitably dominate all meetings.
immy 7y ago
Seems obvious and succinct to me: on Zoom, you feel compelled to look at the screen all the time. In-person, you can respectfully look anywhere in the room because the other person shares the physical space and can intuit where your attention is.
- mkj 7y ago
  I wonder if positioning the webcam say 2m away looking at the general workspace would work better - not just the head. Need to have highish res video for faces still to be distinguishable though.
jrockway 7y ago
I think another issue is having to re-invent cues for changing who is talking in the conversation. When you're talking to someone in person, you can pick up a lot of information as to whether they want to continue talking, or whether it's your turn. On video conferences, those things are missing. You might detect a lull in the conversation and start talking, but at the same time, someone else does the same thing and starts talking. You have 100ms+ of latency, so you can get into what you're saying before realizing that someone else took their turn (or you took theirs). The collision mitigation algorithm takes place, and it's just as bad for your mental fatigue as it is for your WiFi's latency (which uses the same algorithm -- listen before talk, and if you collide, wait a random amount of time and repeat). These things just don't happen when a few people are in the same room together. The result is that we try to use the video channel to pre-allocate timeslots for speaking. You make your eyes bigger, you raise a finger... but sometimes people aren't looking at the video, or don't understand what your newly-invented cue actually means. This is all very tiring. The overall quality of the call is much lower than real life, as well. People do not own good microphones or cameras, so you can't actually hear them or see them very well. The noise gate intervenes and just cuts off audio from time to time. It is maddening how bad it all is. Many years ago when I worked for Bank of America, we had these multiple-100k Cisco videoconferencing setups. They worked really well. My friends and I were at work pretty late and there was a tornado warning, so we couldn't go home (we all biked). We went to these conference rooms, set up a link between the two rooms right next to each other, and had a totally normal conference. (Things were set up so that the entire wall of the room was a video screen, and it had an array of cameras, microphones, and speakers. Everything was tuned perfectly so it looked like the people in the other room were just sitting across the table from you. There was no latency, everyone was their normal size, and the audio and video quality were perfect. Obviously with two rooms across the hall from each other, there shouldn't be any latency... but at least the system didn't add its own. It makes a big difference.) Finally, I think another issue is that people just aren't used to getting work done with video conferences. I worked as a remote team at Google, so pretty much 100% of my meetings were video conferences. 1:1s with my manager and everything else. The system suffered from the same quality/latency issues as anything else (though we did typically have good cameras and microphone arrays in every room), but through practice, people got good at getting stuff done despite the limitations. I never really felt fatigued the way I do on calls with random people at home. (I guess my tips are: have an agenda in advance, and use your screen share to show progress through the agenda. Call on people in remote locations: "Anyone from the New York room have anything to add?".)
willmacdonald 7y ago
On a slightly related subject I can HIGHLY recommend Google duo for voice calls. Very little latency, fantastic clarity and the ability for both parties to talk and listen at the same time. Makes it so much less tiring for long conversations. I have not tried it for group conversations yet.
fxtentacle 7y ago
I think the main cause of stress and fatigue is that you have to be presentable all the time. I put a sticker over my camera and I bought a headset with a hardware mute switch (so that it doesn't show) and now I can phase out just like I'd do in a regular meeting :)
- blackrock 7y ago
  I recommend a camera cover slider. This one works great. It gives me some sense of physical security that hackers can’t penetrate the camera, or corporate can’t spy on me, since they’re now installing desktop screen capture spyware on your laptops. They can probably spy on you by stealthily activating the microphone, but that’s a different problem. https://www.amazon.com/0-027in-MacBook-Smartphone-Protecting-Security/dp/B077ZT29P2 https://www.amazon.com/0-027in-MacBook-Smartphone-Protecting...
rhplus 7y ago
I find leaving a call to be difficult. In the real world, someone just “dropping in” to a meeting room can nod, wave, or gesture to say hi, find the right moment to enter the conversation, make a point and then leave with the same nod, wave or gesture. You can’t do that on a video call without either seeming rude (“Foo has left the call”) or breaking the main conversation flow (“Hey everyone, I’m gonna leave now”). It’s tiresome and I end up sitting on calls until everyone else is ready to exit.
- jsilence 7y ago
  I usually leave message in the chat like "sorry, gotta go" and wave into the camera when exiting. Don't have the impression that this is disrupting the conversation too much.
- galoisgirl 7y ago
  I have the same issue with vim.
qppo 7y ago
I think the problem is that Zoom hasn't solved any of the hard problems with scheduling and holding meetings remotely. They got decent/reliable multimedia multicast, and I'll give them that. Talk to anyone in process management/optimization and they'll probably rant to you about how bad most people are at holding and attending meetings. The "one page memo" at Amazon is kind of famous. Zoom (and all its competitors) could do a lot to solve these problems and doesn't. That's the source of Zoom fatigue. People are bad at meetings, don't know they're bad at them, and hold bad meetings. It's stressful and tiring. Maybe Zoom just makes it more obvious when you can't easily joke around or grab a coffee. To me it seems that all these remote meeting software solutions are only focused on the purely technical problems, because they're really easy to specify and measure improvement. I haven't really seen anyone use technology to really go after the social problems of video conferencing yet, at least not like how Discord and Slack have done in their domains.
sgt 7y ago
Thinking a lot of Zoom meetings are just too long. I recommend max 30 minutes for a meeting, almost regardless what it is about. It's enough to come up with some action points that can be worked on in the meantime, then followed up with a new meeting e.g. in the afternoon.
aurbano 7y ago
Just a little anecdote that’s relevant here. Around 10 years ago my girlfriend didn’t have wifi home yet (low tech family), so we spoke at night over landline, as those calls were free. And it definitely did feel like what some people here are saying: you could hear everything with no delay or cuts at all, the whole call just felt like she was there next to me. They eventually setup wifi in their home, so we switched to VoIp calls, mainly so we wouldn’t block our families’ landlines for a couple hours every day. And the quality was so much worse... The delay sometimes would be so bad that we had this technique where one would slowly count down from 3 and then say “Now”! Then when the other heard Now they’d say Now too, and the first person could essentially count the seconds. This way we could “slow down” our conversation to accomodate for the multi-second delay, which (thinking back) was like our own protocol for dealing with signal delay!
- csa 7y ago
  I will go out on a limb and say that the issues you describe had more to do with your internet connection(s) than with VoiP. In the mid-2000s, I used Vonage (VoiP) from Japan to the US all the time. People were shocked because it sounded like I was right next to them. My grandmother actually thought I was bamboozling her by saying I was in Japan because she thought that there was no way it could be so clear. Granted, I was usually dialing my VoiP on a blistering fast internet connection (not in Tokyo, to be fair) to a POTS line in the US, but the connection was amazing. So I wonder how 10 years ago the VoiP-VoiP connection was so poor. Do you think it was basic internet speed (which the US has historically been behind other developed countries), or do you think it was something else?
  - aurbano 7y ago
    Could very well be, she had a very basic plan (around 10Mbps), while I had a fiber plan on 200Mbps so maybe that was the issue. I can't recall how it was with other people though.
orbifold 7y ago
I imagine reading this article to a uranium mine worker in Namibia.
- galoisgirl 7y ago
  Over a video call? Please no...
sdffdsfdsfsddsf 7y ago
Aren't meetings in general draining?
ape4 7y ago
You are completing with the latest show on Netflix - that most people would rather be watching
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Has anyone here used Mumble? They put a great deal of effort into lowering latency, and in my experience the results are quite good. I wish it wasn’t so fringe so I could get non-tech people to use it with me.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I just looked. It's not free. The website ambiance is also not very inviting.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Ah, I know what you saw! That's the wrong site—how did they get to the top of Google? The correct one is: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/ It's free, OSS, etc. It does require hosting a server, however.
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      They have the same name as a competing service??? It sounds like they made a mistake choosing that name/domain.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        I think Mumble.com hosts instances of Mumble.info's software (although they aren't related a la WordPress.com), so they aren't competing per se. Definitely an unfortunate situation, though.
aaron695 7y ago
I think it's exactly the same as ‘Moral Fatigue’ Every meeting you have to think about audio, video, the background, how to chat, is mute really really on, what are you wearing, other people in the house, the fact your setup is being judged. In an office you can just do it. It's not until you have set yourself up and comfortable and confident you then notice all the little things missing that we know are important to humans, like touch and smell and body posture and 3D video and 3D sound which I think are not about fatigue but something else. The Reason You’re Exhausted Is ‘Moral Fatigue’ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/corona-exhausted-moral-fatigue-974311/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/corona...
peyton022 7y ago
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notacoward 7y ago
The "uncanny valley" aspect is something I have experienced, but the big thing for me is the accumulation of three types of events. (1) People trying to talk at the same time and taking several seconds to sort out who goes first. (2) Glitches when everything freezes or even gets kicked out and brought back in, taking even longer to resolve. (3) Wanting to say something and having to wait ages as people with less lag (I'm on the opposite side of the continent from everyone else) keep jumping in without a break. Each instance of these raises my annoyance level. Dozens upon dozens of them even in a half-hour meeting can leave me totally exhausted from trying to tamp down the anger. By contrast, doing a 1:1 over VC isn't nearly so bad. Maybe an occasional bad moment, but not enough for fatigue to set in. I highly recommend that everyone do that comparison for themselves. The problems tend to increase more than linearly with number of participants, until there are enough that everyone accepts the need for strong moderation and two out of the three issues drop back to near zero.
PeterStuer 7y ago
I'll take a 1 hour Zoom call over the 1:30h commute to meeting in traffic jams, 1 hour meeting, 1:30h back in traffic jams any day. Any 'Zoom Fatigue' I'll shrug off with a nice walk and a coffee in 30 minutes. The stress from spending 3hrs bumper to bumper ruins more than just the entire day.
ayodio 7y ago
It is exactly the same as why we can't drive as well while on the phone. When face to face with someone every possible audio frequencies emited by the other person will reach you. This means your brain won't have much work to do to make sense of this information since it is 'complete'. In a zoom meeting in most cases everybody is on his laptop using the built in laptop microphone. This means the sound will be mediocre at best concidering there isn't any network issue. Voice quality will be compressed and lack certain frequencies that you don't notice but help you decypher more quickly the other person speech. That means that the brain energy necessary to only be able to understand the person in a zoom meeting for the same amount of time is more important than in a real life meeting.
DebtDeflation 7y ago
I find the video component to be completely superfluous and often distracting. The combination of audio, screen-sharing, and chat are more than adequate for accomplishing the task at hand. I don't need to watch grainy, stuttering video of my co-workers in sweat pants to be productive.
mwcampbell 7y ago
I think the money quote is this: > perceiving an image of a body in virtual space rather than perceiving a body itself in shared space may be worse than not perceiving a body at all. So drop the video and go audio only. Of course, I'm legally blind, so I can't really understand why perceiving facial expressions and body language is apparently so important. But one of my best friends is totally blind, and the two of us have communicated over two decades without ever being able to see each other, so it can work.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  It's a familiarity thing. Sighted people are used to a manner of communication that includes visual cues, and people always prefer what they're used to. I also find that people who are used to visual in-person communication also dislike videoconferencing because they can't see things like when another person is crossing their legs or tapping their foot. Whether any of that is actually beneficial is another question entirely. Personally, I have an easier time concentrating on the conversation when it is audio only.
cosmodisk 7y ago
To me, physical meetings are as draining as the ones using zoom. If it's a meeting,where you just sip coffee, listen to others who do all the taking,then it's easy, however beimg actively involved in a convo,while trying to come up with some useful stuff,can be draining.
skyros 7y ago
Long time lurker, first time commenter. The original post and the comments here are interesting and intriguing, but many points raised here (a) assume that the initial proposition is in fact true, and (b) don't ask as to what evidence is available in support of the proposition (or indeed whether there is evidence that might appear to contradict it) beyond our own individual experience: 'Why is video-conferencing so exhausting?' This is not to say that Zoom (etc.) isn't tiring to use, simply that it's sensible first to ask questions such as: - is it particularly tiring to use? How do we know? - if Zoom etc. is particularly tiring, for what proportion of users is this the case? - are some types of users more affected than others? Why? - is fatigue related specifically to video (as opposed to audio) use? - is fatigue related to the number of concurrent users in a given call? - is all video-conferencing similarly tiring, or are some platforms more so than others, and if so, why? UI? Latency? Some other reason? - are Zoom meetings any more tiring than traditional face-to-face meetings? - etc.
- Bedon292 7y ago
  I think these are great points. I came to here to understand what people's feelings were on the matter. I don't particularly find 'Zoom' tiring any more so than a regular meeting. Is the problem these days just more meetings than there used to be? Because people are still trying to figure out the whole remote work thing? And in fact I kinda like them better than regular meetings, because I can walk around the house and do whatever. But I also don't have a webcam requirement either, so maybe that's the difference for me.
zrail 7y ago
As a full time remote worker, one of my favorite things about my setup is that I have a 43" 4k monitor set about 6 feet away from my eyes. I use macOS's scaling feature to make everything bigger. This has significantly reduced my eye strain and my overall fatigue. My setup is somewhat unique, as far as I can tell. I have the monitor on a wheeled TV stand and I use a small hand cranked standing desk to support my laptop and keyboard. The laptop is connected to a dock that sits below the monitor with one Thunderbolt 3 cable, then I have one USB cable returning from the hub to the desk to support my microphone and keyboard. This setup gives me a ton of flexibility in how I position myself relative to the light in the room and the distance between my eyes and the monitor while maintaining a standing position.
wintermutestwin 7y ago
The elephant in the room is the lack of EYE CONTACT. As a mediator now having to work on video, this is very close to a deal breaker. We don't hear much about it on tech news because no one has a mass market solution. A google search will find either a wasteland of dead SW and HW products or room based systems that are so expensive that they are typically bought by globals for CxOs.
sarah180 7y ago
I have a simpler explanation, and my mantra for life. Are you finding something difficult? Is it something you've been doing frequently for a long time? If not, then of course it's difficult. Keep hope: We get good at the things we do in life.
shadowtree 7y ago
Love how nobody checks what Zoom actually does in terms of audio. First, the do a lot around synchronizing video and audio. On bad connections they slow and speed up video and audio to keep the appearance of coherence. Really, really hard stuff that other video conf systems fail at. Also, they have audio settings to filter background noise. Basic settings around the mic, but the Advanced settings about noise cancellation ("Original Audio"). If you book online classes for music teachers, you'll see why they prefer Zoom and which settings they recommend.
tylerjwilk00 7y ago
I recently discovered that the best way for me to communicate over Zoom when speaking is to not even look at the screen. I'll stare off into the distance and just focus on my words and thoughts. Video and audio lag seems to short circuit the communication interrupt window that happens normally in person to person communication, although in large enough gatherings that fails even IRL. Another thing is that the way Zoom gallery mode works is a bit unnatural in IRL. In normal P2P communication your only looking at one set of eyes balls at a time. All of the sudden you have several sets of eyeballs you can see all it once. This makes it more like public speaking and less like a small tribe meeting.

232 points by longdefeat 7y ago

First time I've heard of this and it's not something I experience at all. I do not find video conferences more exhausting than in-person meetings - if anything maybe even the opposite. One factor than can make it more tiring is poor connectivity and audio to the point where it becomes an effort to interpret what others are saying/making oneself understood. Other than that I think it's just a matter of what one is accustomed to.

woliveirajr 7y ago
I have more freedom when I'm online that meeting in person. The few times online meetings are stressing, IMO, are the same that would make me mad in person: people who keep talking without allowing interventions, people who don't what to say and just pretend to say things, people who have bad latency (yes, that take some seconds before speaking)
randallsquared 7y ago
I also find meetings via Zoom less draining, in general, than in-person meetings. Maybe this is why: > This, too, amounts to a persistent expenditure of social and cognitive labor as I inadvertently mind my image as well as the images of the other participants. If I understand the author correctly, if they don't have a constant image of themselves presented to them, they aren't constantly processing how they look to others(!)? Well, in that case, I can see why Zoom would be more draining, but, you know, welcome to my world in any situation except when I'm alone or only with my SO.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fouc 7y ago

> having to remain relatively still in front of a camera If you video conference from your phone or laptop then you can move around.

crazygringo 7y ago

For one-on-one videoconferencing meetings with normal latency (e.g. within 3-4 time zones), I find zero fatigue or problems like this. The only "fatigue" I find is frustration when people are talking over each other or multiple people trying to jump in at the same time. This generally happens either when latency is bad (e.g. US-Japan), connections are bad generally (MS Office decides to auto-update in the background and saturate your download), or just when it's a particularly contentious meeting with lots of people trying to get a word in edgewise, and all the normal cues you use to figure out when to talk just aren't there. And the reasons for those all seem self-evident.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
A meeting that has a component of "go around the room and get everyone's input" is harder in Zoom. In a physical room, you go clockwise or counterclockwise. But on Zoom, when someone finishes talking, who knows who's supposed to go next?
- evolve2k 7y ago
  We created a pattern that when they finish the speaker nominates who goes next, cuts a bunch of awkward lag from going around the circle. Maybe give that a try.
- adenner 7y ago
  You need someone to serve as the facilitator for the meeting and call out the order.
  - cygned 7y ago
    And have ground rules established.

djsumdog 7y ago

I don't know about those theories. I suspect something else. Do you remember landlines, and how responsive they were? You would say things back and fourth and the conversation just worked, even on three-way and conference calls? There was very little noticeable lag! Even in the early cellphone days, I'd often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that cancellation stuff and you feel like the conversation is split into pieces .. like a walkie-talkie where you don't control the "over" / button press. Cellphones have gotten better, but they've never really hit the latency of landlines (or maybe they have and I didn't notice. I never actually talk to people on my phone any more). Video conferencing like that that but worse. It's really apparent if you're on a remote team and you're next to someone on the same call. You can hear that delay. I like a lot of the fatigue comes from that delay. We can connect more people now, with video, over great distances, but it does come at a cost at moving from virtual dedicated circuits to package switches networks and transcoding on some central server.

StefanKarpinski 7y ago
That and you’re constantly struggling to decipher audio and make yourself understood. Much like talking in a bar that’s too loud is exhausting. A lot of the exhaustion seems like it’s the difficulty of compensating for a high latency, low-bandwidth, low quality experience. We’re just not evolved for it—reality is the opposite of all of those things.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fattire 7y ago
  This is it. The issue is exhaustion compensating for all the audio problems-- dogs barking, room echoes, compression, images out of sync, the delay in reactions (constantly being unsure if you were heard- not knowing what the correct volume you should be speaking is), being asked to repeat yourself, and the mix of your audio with those of others. It's a lot to process. With 15 people on "speakerphone", the audio is IMO the biggest and most taxing problem.

hvs 7y ago

Meetings are exhausting, Zoom or no Zoom. I’ve noticed no difference and I’m on at least 3/day.

renewiltord 7y ago

Do not feel this. I have a wireless headset so I'll occasionally mute my mic and do a couple of dumb-bell curls or go get some water while thinking. Feels fine, honestly. I like being present for the social comfort I get from physical proximity to people but the Zoom thing just has that absent, so I don't get that extra bonus but I still don't feel tired.

solidasparagus 7y ago
You do curls on video?
- ars 7y ago
  I'm not the person you replied to, but I never turn on my video.
  - mixonEPA 7y ago
    Do you ever feel pressured to turn it on when everyone else in the call has their video on? I know I do and it's something I need to work on cause I find myself more productive and engage with the camera off for myself.
    - hnzix 7y ago
      Turn the camera off after introductions, then only turn it back on when you want to make an important point or the convo is about a very specific work item related to you. If someone complains, you can say you don't want to clutter up the video feed or that you're having latency issues (also, they're a dick).
    - ars 7y ago
      I do sometimes feel that pressure, but my laptop is in a docking station, so the camera is not near me. And I have no motivation to get an external camera :)
- renewiltord 7y ago

sudosteph 7y ago

Any other Autism Spectrum or ADHD people who feel less fatigued by video meetings compared to IRL? The things I like: - having the range of activity during a meeting constrained to one area in front of me so I don't have to look around the room to make sure I'm not missing something / get overstimulated by too much stuff happening. - Boxes with borders lighting up when someone is making noise / talking so I know where to look. - Names always associated with faces - text chat area for sharing links and non-disruptive ways to request clarification - No longer get lost in the hallway trying to find rooms with weird names - Don't have to kick people out of rooms when they stay too long - can foot tap and fidget hands off screen without people noticing

mjayhn 7y ago
My problem is I can't multitask during a zoom at all. I'm so anxious that someone will ask me a question so I'm tuned in the entire time while everyone else is pretty obviously off working on the side. I also find that I stare at myself fidgeting. It's nowhere near as bad as in person where I just want to not talk at all, though. Also if everyone is on different timezones please don't make us turn on webcams. I'm getting a lot of 7-8am meetings lately now that my team is mostly East of me. I'm just waking up. I was in meetings from 8am this morning. I showered at 2pm when I finally got a 30 minute break.
- randycupertino 7y ago
  I'm a little bit vain, a bit of a narcissist and self-conscious. I find it very distracting on Zoom to be looking at my own face on video to ensure I look like I'm properly paying attention, showing my best angle (hiding a double chin!) and not fidgeting. Maybe I'm just too much in my own head about it, but it seems there's a bit of a performative element to zoom meetings making me a lot more award of presentation and perception than in irl meetings.
  - sudosteph 7y ago
    That makes total sense, most people don't make a habit of looking at themselves unless it's for the purposes of evaluating or adjusting something about their presentation. I tend to just make sure it's setup right when it starts, then use the option to hide the self-view to avoid that distraction. I don't care if I might look silly later, since constantly readjusting is a silliness of it's own. And someone will ping me if the camera messes up.

stainforth 7y ago

I was on a partially-remote team for years, with bi-weekly team conference calls - webcam was possible but we all never used it, not even the manager. Screenshare was used for presentations. But audio was enough. Why is everyone defaulting to video calls for things? It adds so much "noise" and cognitive load on things.

intopieces 7y ago
Some people miss seeing their colleagues' faces. I know I do.
- slimed 7y ago
  You miss them. Not their faces.
  - mixonEPA 7y ago
    I mean for some people it is just their faces... Lol
  - touktouk 7y ago
    We can only assume that if the author of previous comment actually missed them and not their faces, they would have said so.
  - asdff 7y ago
    My personal happiness plummeted, anecdotally, when my coworkers started dropping the video feed one by one. It was surprising, but noticeable and significant.
    - intopieces 7y ago
      Same for me. There's just little things about interacting with a person face to face, personality aspects like how they express themselves: posture, eye movement, facial expression even. They just add to the interestingness of the work.
7y ago

lostdog 7y ago

Lots of normal things about human interaction are broken in Zoom meetings. * You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you. * You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person. * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant. * There's no sense of space. You can't look over at person if whomever is talking just teleports to the center of the screen. Or if the layout is fixed, sound isn't coming from anywhere in particular, so you need to search around for who's talking. And everyone on screen is looking a random direction.

joegahona 7y ago
Also inevitably the same 3 or 4 people join all the Zooms with their camera off, and mic off, which creates a disconnect. This is akin to showing up to an in-person meeting under a giant blanket, only the sound quality of someone talking from underneath a blanket is significantly better than Zoom.
xioxox 7y ago
In our (academic) meetings, people generally default to switching off their camera when there's more than a handful of participants. I find this much less stressful. I can also do some physical activity which helps concentration if I'm just listening.
- kqr 7y ago
  It also puts a lot less pressure on the network connections involved when they aren't also loaded with 8 real-time video streams.
dylan604 7y ago
So why the fixation on a video call? I'm probably just an old curmudgeon, but to me the benefits do not out weigh the oddities being discussed. Everyone wearing their pieces of flair with their "personalized" backgrounds are tiresome. I can see the benefits of a screen share/presentation, but I really don't need to see the other people involved. I don't care about tone of voice. I get sarcasm. For the people that don't, then even if they can see them, the sarcasm isn't more/less because it's a video call. Video calls to me are just another version of "Hey look at me!!!! I'm special"

ken 7y ago

I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a quiet room. Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go. Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just to parse the audio into meaning. It’s exhausting. Cell phone calls are still pretty bad, too. Low bandwidth digital audio compression is just wretched.

zdragnar 7y ago
Could it be an issue with microphones or speaker quality? My fully remote team has used zoom for all of our meetings, and unless someone is calling in from a cell phone in a busy area, I don't recall a time when I have had difficulty understanding someone. If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who doesn't talk loud enough for the entire table to hear (which is sometimes me, because I have a very soft voice and struggle to speak loudly in big meetings).
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Not OP. Some people do have really terrible hardware. It would be good IMO if the software had an input quality indication. Or a test mode that does a loop test, play on speaker at end A, listen on mic A, play back mic A on speaker B, listen on mic B, analyse profile and reverse the test - "you may experience poor sound as B's microphone has a bad frequency profile" or something. The other thing that would be nice is if Win10 hadn't hidden the microphone level/gain controls.
- ken 7y ago
  It’s possible, but then why is it $1000 smartphones are struggling with this, and $5 landline phones from 1993 did just fine? Did Apple skimp on audio hardware that bad? That’s a little hard to believe.
  - 7y ago

ryandrake 7y ago

“Kevin, you’re muted. Unmute and say that again, please” “Sara, your voice cut out for 30 seconds and we didn’t hear any of that, can you please repeat?” Two people talking: “Bfrhtxhlcyfoydoyd... oh, you go ahead” “no, you go ahead” “OK like I was saying, cofhlflydhlbdfykdjtxtc...” “Hang on, I think Kumar just disconnected. We need him to continue.” “Can someone text Kumar and see if he can rejoin?” “I can’t see more than five huge pixels of your presentation, Jan. Can you re-enable screen sharing?” Things that are exhausting and don’t happen during face to face meetings...

smilespray 7y ago
Yup, that's pretty much every videoconference meeting.
hnzix 7y ago
Or that one person who refuses to mute while typing loudly and sniffling and slurping their coffee and making wet sloppy mouth noises.

boltzmann_brain 7y ago

I dunno, for me it's better because I can space out and do other things instead of listening to useless conversations that inevitably dominate all meetings.

immy 7y ago

Seems obvious and succinct to me: on Zoom, you feel compelled to look at the screen all the time. In-person, you can respectfully look anywhere in the room because the other person shares the physical space and can intuit where your attention is.

mkj 7y ago
I wonder if positioning the webcam say 2m away looking at the general workspace would work better - not just the head. Need to have highish res video for faces still to be distinguishable though.

jrockway 7y ago

I think another issue is having to re-invent cues for changing who is talking in the conversation. When you're talking to someone in person, you can pick up a lot of information as to whether they want to continue talking, or whether it's your turn. On video conferences, those things are missing. You might detect a lull in the conversation and start talking, but at the same time, someone else does the same thing and starts talking. You have 100ms+ of latency, so you can get into what you're saying before realizing that someone else took their turn (or you took theirs). The collision mitigation algorithm takes place, and it's just as bad for your mental fatigue as it is for your WiFi's latency (which uses the same algorithm -- listen before talk, and if you collide, wait a random amount of time and repeat). These things just don't happen when a few people are in the same room together. The result is that we try to use the video channel to pre-allocate timeslots for speaking. You make your eyes bigger, you raise a finger... but sometimes people aren't looking at the video, or don't understand what your newly-invented cue actually means. This is all very tiring. The overall quality of the call is much lower than real life, as well. People do not own good microphones or cameras, so you can't actually hear them or see them very well. The noise gate intervenes and just cuts off audio from time to time. It is maddening how bad it all is. Many years ago when I worked for Bank of America, we had these multiple-100k Cisco videoconferencing setups. They worked really well. My friends and I were at work pretty late and there was a tornado warning, so we couldn't go home (we all biked). We went to these conference rooms, set up a link between the two rooms right next to each other, and had a totally normal conference. (Things were set up so that the entire wall of the room was a video screen, and it had an array of cameras, microphones, and speakers. Everything was tuned perfectly so it looked like the people in the other room were just sitting across the table from you. There was no latency, everyone was their normal size, and the audio and video quality were perfect. Obviously with two rooms across the hall from each other, there shouldn't be any latency... but at least the system didn't add its own. It makes a big difference.) Finally, I think another issue is that people just aren't used to getting work done with video conferences. I worked as a remote team at Google, so pretty much 100% of my meetings were video conferences. 1:1s with my manager and everything else. The system suffered from the same quality/latency issues as anything else (though we did typically have good cameras and microphone arrays in every room), but through practice, people got good at getting stuff done despite the limitations. I never really felt fatigued the way I do on calls with random people at home. (I guess my tips are: have an agenda in advance, and use your screen share to show progress through the agenda. Call on people in remote locations: "Anyone from the New York room have anything to add?".)

willmacdonald 7y ago

On a slightly related subject I can HIGHLY recommend Google duo for voice calls. Very little latency, fantastic clarity and the ability for both parties to talk and listen at the same time. Makes it so much less tiring for long conversations. I have not tried it for group conversations yet.

fxtentacle 7y ago

I think the main cause of stress and fatigue is that you have to be presentable all the time. I put a sticker over my camera and I bought a headset with a hardware mute switch (so that it doesn't show) and now I can phase out just like I'd do in a regular meeting :)

blackrock 7y ago
I recommend a camera cover slider. This one works great. It gives me some sense of physical security that hackers can’t penetrate the camera, or corporate can’t spy on me, since they’re now installing desktop screen capture spyware on your laptops. They can probably spy on you by stealthily activating the microphone, but that’s a different problem. https://www.amazon.com/0-027in-MacBook-Smartphone-Protecting-Security/dp/B077ZT29P2 https://www.amazon.com/0-027in-MacBook-Smartphone-Protecting...

rhplus 7y ago

I find leaving a call to be difficult. In the real world, someone just “dropping in” to a meeting room can nod, wave, or gesture to say hi, find the right moment to enter the conversation, make a point and then leave with the same nod, wave or gesture. You can’t do that on a video call without either seeming rude (“Foo has left the call”) or breaking the main conversation flow (“Hey everyone, I’m gonna leave now”). It’s tiresome and I end up sitting on calls until everyone else is ready to exit.

jsilence 7y ago
I usually leave message in the chat like "sorry, gotta go" and wave into the camera when exiting. Don't have the impression that this is disrupting the conversation too much.
galoisgirl 7y ago
I have the same issue with vim.

qppo 7y ago

I think the problem is that Zoom hasn't solved any of the hard problems with scheduling and holding meetings remotely. They got decent/reliable multimedia multicast, and I'll give them that. Talk to anyone in process management/optimization and they'll probably rant to you about how bad most people are at holding and attending meetings. The "one page memo" at Amazon is kind of famous. Zoom (and all its competitors) could do a lot to solve these problems and doesn't. That's the source of Zoom fatigue. People are bad at meetings, don't know they're bad at them, and hold bad meetings. It's stressful and tiring. Maybe Zoom just makes it more obvious when you can't easily joke around or grab a coffee. To me it seems that all these remote meeting software solutions are only focused on the purely technical problems, because they're really easy to specify and measure improvement. I haven't really seen anyone use technology to really go after the social problems of video conferencing yet, at least not like how Discord and Slack have done in their domains.

sgt 7y ago

Thinking a lot of Zoom meetings are just too long. I recommend max 30 minutes for a meeting, almost regardless what it is about. It's enough to come up with some action points that can be worked on in the meantime, then followed up with a new meeting e.g. in the afternoon.

aurbano 7y ago

Just a little anecdote that’s relevant here. Around 10 years ago my girlfriend didn’t have wifi home yet (low tech family), so we spoke at night over landline, as those calls were free. And it definitely did feel like what some people here are saying: you could hear everything with no delay or cuts at all, the whole call just felt like she was there next to me. They eventually setup wifi in their home, so we switched to VoIp calls, mainly so we wouldn’t block our families’ landlines for a couple hours every day. And the quality was so much worse... The delay sometimes would be so bad that we had this technique where one would slowly count down from 3 and then say “Now”! Then when the other heard Now they’d say Now too, and the first person could essentially count the seconds. This way we could “slow down” our conversation to accomodate for the multi-second delay, which (thinking back) was like our own protocol for dealing with signal delay!

csa 7y ago
I will go out on a limb and say that the issues you describe had more to do with your internet connection(s) than with VoiP. In the mid-2000s, I used Vonage (VoiP) from Japan to the US all the time. People were shocked because it sounded like I was right next to them. My grandmother actually thought I was bamboozling her by saying I was in Japan because she thought that there was no way it could be so clear. Granted, I was usually dialing my VoiP on a blistering fast internet connection (not in Tokyo, to be fair) to a POTS line in the US, but the connection was amazing. So I wonder how 10 years ago the VoiP-VoiP connection was so poor. Do you think it was basic internet speed (which the US has historically been behind other developed countries), or do you think it was something else?
- aurbano 7y ago
  Could very well be, she had a very basic plan (around 10Mbps), while I had a fiber plan on 200Mbps so maybe that was the issue. I can't recall how it was with other people though.

orbifold 7y ago

I imagine reading this article to a uranium mine worker in Namibia.

galoisgirl 7y ago
Over a video call? Please no...

sdffdsfdsfsddsf 7y ago

Aren't meetings in general draining?

ape4 7y ago

You are completing with the latest show on Netflix - that most people would rather be watching

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Has anyone here used Mumble? They put a great deal of effort into lowering latency, and in my experience the results are quite good. I wish it wasn’t so fringe so I could get non-tech people to use it with me.

RandomBacon 7y ago
I just looked. It's not free. The website ambiance is also not very inviting.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Ah, I know what you saw! That's the wrong site—how did they get to the top of Google? The correct one is: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/ It's free, OSS, etc. It does require hosting a server, however.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    They have the same name as a competing service??? It sounds like they made a mistake choosing that name/domain.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      I think Mumble.com hosts instances of Mumble.info's software (although they aren't related a la WordPress.com), so they aren't competing per se. Definitely an unfortunate situation, though.

aaron695 7y ago

I think it's exactly the same as ‘Moral Fatigue’ Every meeting you have to think about audio, video, the background, how to chat, is mute really really on, what are you wearing, other people in the house, the fact your setup is being judged. In an office you can just do it. It's not until you have set yourself up and comfortable and confident you then notice all the little things missing that we know are important to humans, like touch and smell and body posture and 3D video and 3D sound which I think are not about fatigue but something else. The Reason You’re Exhausted Is ‘Moral Fatigue’ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/corona-exhausted-moral-fatigue-974311/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/corona...

peyton022 7y ago

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notacoward 7y ago

The "uncanny valley" aspect is something I have experienced, but the big thing for me is the accumulation of three types of events. (1) People trying to talk at the same time and taking several seconds to sort out who goes first. (2) Glitches when everything freezes or even gets kicked out and brought back in, taking even longer to resolve. (3) Wanting to say something and having to wait ages as people with less lag (I'm on the opposite side of the continent from everyone else) keep jumping in without a break. Each instance of these raises my annoyance level. Dozens upon dozens of them even in a half-hour meeting can leave me totally exhausted from trying to tamp down the anger. By contrast, doing a 1:1 over VC isn't nearly so bad. Maybe an occasional bad moment, but not enough for fatigue to set in. I highly recommend that everyone do that comparison for themselves. The problems tend to increase more than linearly with number of participants, until there are enough that everyone accepts the need for strong moderation and two out of the three issues drop back to near zero.

PeterStuer 7y ago

I'll take a 1 hour Zoom call over the 1:30h commute to meeting in traffic jams, 1 hour meeting, 1:30h back in traffic jams any day. Any 'Zoom Fatigue' I'll shrug off with a nice walk and a coffee in 30 minutes. The stress from spending 3hrs bumper to bumper ruins more than just the entire day.

ayodio 7y ago

It is exactly the same as why we can't drive as well while on the phone. When face to face with someone every possible audio frequencies emited by the other person will reach you. This means your brain won't have much work to do to make sense of this information since it is 'complete'. In a zoom meeting in most cases everybody is on his laptop using the built in laptop microphone. This means the sound will be mediocre at best concidering there isn't any network issue. Voice quality will be compressed and lack certain frequencies that you don't notice but help you decypher more quickly the other person speech. That means that the brain energy necessary to only be able to understand the person in a zoom meeting for the same amount of time is more important than in a real life meeting.

DebtDeflation 7y ago

I find the video component to be completely superfluous and often distracting. The combination of audio, screen-sharing, and chat are more than adequate for accomplishing the task at hand. I don't need to watch grainy, stuttering video of my co-workers in sweat pants to be productive.

mwcampbell 7y ago

I think the money quote is this: > perceiving an image of a body in virtual space rather than perceiving a body itself in shared space may be worse than not perceiving a body at all. So drop the video and go audio only. Of course, I'm legally blind, so I can't really understand why perceiving facial expressions and body language is apparently so important. But one of my best friends is totally blind, and the two of us have communicated over two decades without ever being able to see each other, so it can work.

mumblemumble 7y ago
It's a familiarity thing. Sighted people are used to a manner of communication that includes visual cues, and people always prefer what they're used to. I also find that people who are used to visual in-person communication also dislike videoconferencing because they can't see things like when another person is crossing their legs or tapping their foot. Whether any of that is actually beneficial is another question entirely. Personally, I have an easier time concentrating on the conversation when it is audio only.

cosmodisk 7y ago

To me, physical meetings are as draining as the ones using zoom. If it's a meeting,where you just sip coffee, listen to others who do all the taking,then it's easy, however beimg actively involved in a convo,while trying to come up with some useful stuff,can be draining.

skyros 7y ago

Long time lurker, first time commenter. The original post and the comments here are interesting and intriguing, but many points raised here (a) assume that the initial proposition is in fact true, and (b) don't ask as to what evidence is available in support of the proposition (or indeed whether there is evidence that might appear to contradict it) beyond our own individual experience: 'Why is video-conferencing so exhausting?' This is not to say that Zoom (etc.) isn't tiring to use, simply that it's sensible first to ask questions such as: - is it particularly tiring to use? How do we know? - if Zoom etc. is particularly tiring, for what proportion of users is this the case? - are some types of users more affected than others? Why? - is fatigue related specifically to video (as opposed to audio) use? - is fatigue related to the number of concurrent users in a given call? - is all video-conferencing similarly tiring, or are some platforms more so than others, and if so, why? UI? Latency? Some other reason? - are Zoom meetings any more tiring than traditional face-to-face meetings? - etc.

Bedon292 7y ago
I think these are great points. I came to here to understand what people's feelings were on the matter. I don't particularly find 'Zoom' tiring any more so than a regular meeting. Is the problem these days just more meetings than there used to be? Because people are still trying to figure out the whole remote work thing? And in fact I kinda like them better than regular meetings, because I can walk around the house and do whatever. But I also don't have a webcam requirement either, so maybe that's the difference for me.

zrail 7y ago

As a full time remote worker, one of my favorite things about my setup is that I have a 43" 4k monitor set about 6 feet away from my eyes. I use macOS's scaling feature to make everything bigger. This has significantly reduced my eye strain and my overall fatigue. My setup is somewhat unique, as far as I can tell. I have the monitor on a wheeled TV stand and I use a small hand cranked standing desk to support my laptop and keyboard. The laptop is connected to a dock that sits below the monitor with one Thunderbolt 3 cable, then I have one USB cable returning from the hub to the desk to support my microphone and keyboard. This setup gives me a ton of flexibility in how I position myself relative to the light in the room and the distance between my eyes and the monitor while maintaining a standing position.

wintermutestwin 7y ago

The elephant in the room is the lack of EYE CONTACT. As a mediator now having to work on video, this is very close to a deal breaker. We don't hear much about it on tech news because no one has a mass market solution. A google search will find either a wasteland of dead SW and HW products or room based systems that are so expensive that they are typically bought by globals for CxOs.

sarah180 7y ago

I have a simpler explanation, and my mantra for life. Are you finding something difficult? Is it something you've been doing frequently for a long time? If not, then of course it's difficult. Keep hope: We get good at the things we do in life.

shadowtree 7y ago

Love how nobody checks what Zoom actually does in terms of audio. First, the do a lot around synchronizing video and audio. On bad connections they slow and speed up video and audio to keep the appearance of coherence. Really, really hard stuff that other video conf systems fail at. Also, they have audio settings to filter background noise. Basic settings around the mic, but the Advanced settings about noise cancellation ("Original Audio"). If you book online classes for music teachers, you'll see why they prefer Zoom and which settings they recommend.

tylerjwilk00 7y ago

I recently discovered that the best way for me to communicate over Zoom when speaking is to not even look at the screen. I'll stare off into the distance and just focus on my words and thoughts. Video and audio lag seems to short circuit the communication interrupt window that happens normally in person to person communication, although in large enough gatherings that fails even IRL. Another thing is that the way Zoom gallery mode works is a bit unnatural in IRL. In normal P2P communication your only looking at one set of eyes balls at a time. All of the sudden you have several sets of eyeballs you can see all it once. This makes it more like public speaking and less like a small tribe meeting.