> In my previous job, I used to spend hours in a conference room with my colleague after we had plotted our plan on the whiteboard. Then, we would just sit down

> In my previous job, I used to spend hours in a conference room with my colleague after we had plotted our plan on the whiteboard. Then, we would just sit down and look at the board in silence for long period of times. With the occasional "what if... no never mind." When covid hit, we tried to do that via zoom. Didn't work. > Silence does not work well on camera. I think that this is not a universal law. My current collaborator and I, who wouldn’t be able to work together in person most of the time under any circumstances, have weekly Zoom calls which are of exactly the mostly-silent type you describe. (He calls them “grunting occasionally at each other.”) Everyone does have to be on board, though. We tried the calls with a third collaborator last year who was less on board with the methodology, and it did not work at all, with a pressure to say _something_ all the time leading to much more talk but much less done.