Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' (2021)

I never liked video calls. Or even phone calls for that matter. I put up with them because most of the rest of the world wants to be remote these days. I'm very much an “in person or in writing, not comfortable with the middle ground” sort.

Seriously considering a change in career (away from dev & related tech) to something where I and colleagues have to be in the same place by necessity at least some of the time (perhaps some sort of lab work?) but that means a drop in salary temporarily as I'll likely have to start much nearer the bottom than I am now…

I never turn on my camera, and minimise the video feeds of everyone else (as in, tab away). Problem solved.

I find some people are very pushy about wanting “everyone to have their camera on”, but I just make various excuses (I lost my camera, the laptop is upside down for better cooling, etc). 5 years now, top of the tech tree (to explain that this has not been a CLM), but still making those same silly excuses ;-)

You’d think someone might have guessed by now.

I strongly suspect 'outreach' personnel have quotas for booking meetings, regardless of outcome. VC backed infra projects will have full teams with no real customers, just a promise of future profitability. At least some of those seats are dedicated setting up meetings. When they are successful, it is often one VC backed startup trading funds with another VC backed project. End users who pay are less important than the hype. The merry-go-round continues.

An annoying waste of time when you are self-funded and their offers assume you have a huge budget. I'm fatigued. The "B" in B2B implies at least one party is doing business with users.

Worse yet are the self-styled "marketing experts" or managers of "influencers" who balk at commission structures, insisting on upfront payment.

Forgot the most important thing: the 150ms to 400ms variable latency in the video/audio feed.

the delay is just too much you have to pre-empt an interrupt, you can’t slip a point in, you have to wait over 2 seconds for someone to respond.

It’s a small difference that isn’t noticeable at first but it makes it impossible to have a creative flowing discussion with remote workers also makes interacting with them at all inherently draining.

Interesting that I have almost always done item 1 from the beginning of using video calls (which was before covid hit).

I generally shrink the window so that individual video feeds are no more than a couple of inches high on my monitor, which is about 3 feet away from my face. Any bigger feels uncomfortably close. There's nothing more offputting that a call that fullscreens the other single participant, especially on a large display.

It amazes me that after all this time the various video conferencing systems still have default behaviours that make their products less pleasant to use. You would have thought they would have at least made an effort to get people to customise the behaviour to their liking. Instead they persist with defaults that people hate but don't realise they can change. I don't think I've ever met someone who likes to see themself through an entire call, but this is the default on all the ones I've ever used and I have to turn it off.

I work remotely. Didn't think about these causes before, but they make sense now. Having a separate laptop for Zoom would solve all these at once.

But besides that, I feel like there are more meetings than before. Maybe it's because the bar is lower now that people can join remotely. I would probably be more exhausted if all these were in-person.

Maybe this is also why introverts and similar people have difficult times in person. If able to function that way it's more taxing / draining.

A lot of focus on the video part or hand waving. A simple reason: one is many. Since the pandemic, the quality of calls has dropped. They generally lead to more; resolution is a rarity. Slogs are indeed exhausting.

My peers and I haven't bothered to use a camera in a decade, it's not applicable in my experience. The tiring factor is more recent

> But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time

Does anyone else's colleagues not do this? We look away, ponder etc all the time

I tend to get intense staring from more senior people who try to weaponise it, which immediately makes it not tense for me as I know they're insecure and playing games

Though there's definitely a few with the belief that intense staring is conveying intense empathy, missing the mark somewhat

These are all true for me, but you know what's worse? In the office I have to hear everyone's meetings all the time. People feel compelled to tap me on the shoulder and interrupt the work that was supposedly so important to get done this sprint.

And you know what? In office, half the team's on video anyway because why hire locally when you can hire nationally or internationally for the best people?

I'll take a few video calls, then some actual privacy for 5 minutes to decompress, so I can actually focus for more than 45 minutes to do my work. The tradeoff is still worth it for me.

Related:

The reason Zoom calls drain your energy — https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...

Neuroscience Explains Why Video Calls Are So Exhausting — https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/neuroscience-explains-why-...