The reason Zoom calls drain your energy – BBC Worklife | Hacker News Reader

The reason Zoom calls drain your energy – BBC Worklife

bbc.com

37 pointsasamant17 comments

I work remote and I've had years of working this out. What works really well for me is to take a super laid back posture to the meeting. Just fancy free. Speak relaxed and slowly almost like you'd expect The Dude Lebowski to. Nobody's gonna talk over you. Your point will be heard. And any details can always be caught in an email or DM later.

If I had to guess why, I think speaking slower and more chill hides away latency effects, and subconsciously causes people to listen more carefully. The cadence of speech also makes it more clear when you're about to say more vs. When you're done talking. It also just relaxes you and gives you more time to formulate the next string of words.

And I don't mean sound like an idiot stoner or offensive jerk. You're just on a beach. Phoned in to be a subject matter expert. And once you've done your part it's back to your book and Margarita. Just noodly relaxed body. Yeah that's it.

I really appreciate this advice, and I plan to try this out tomorrow. I know that I have a tendency to speak quickly, and I have been including verbiage to indicate when I'm done talking to prevent people from interrupting. Just a simple "that's it" or asking a question at the end has been helpful for me.

Video is the problem.

I worked at one of the earliest IP based Video Conferencing companies back in the early 90's. The video wore us out. We did video all the time for 3 years.

I've been working from home consistently since 2008, 3 different companies, and we never use video, it's all audio conferencing, except maybe for an all hands meeting where the company leaders are talking about something important.

If find video tiring and a waste of time. The video isn't good enough, or big enough to pick up facial "clues", and since people aren't in the same room body language is totally different.

Turn off the video everyone, and you'll be much happier.

Get a really good stereo wireless headset, that way you don't need to worry about feedback or sounding like you are in an echo chamber. My headset lets me roam all around my house, and since it's stereo I can listen to music between meetings.

Agreed: been working from home a long time (25+ years) and I just never do video chat; I say high with video on and then switch off. It makes all the difference. I always take the call on my phone, so I do not see others either (if they insist on doing video).

When you switch the video off the others usually roll their eyes. When you talk people are only shaking their head from left to right while making thumbs up hand signals.

Another great tip when video/audio conferencing is to set up monitoring for your microphone. If you play back your microphone over your headset you're way less susceptible to audio quality issues like echo.

Your brain is looking for confirmation that your mouth is doing as instructed. Not getting that confirmation is tiring, but getting it with a delay due to echo is even worse.

> Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy.

Welcome to the everyday experience of non-neurotypical people in every single meeting you've ever had with them.

The problem is that you can’t make eye contact.

The one exception is FaceTime in an iPhone, FaceTime subtly edits your eyes to make it look like you’re looking at the camera and not down at the screen. But it doesn’t work with separate webcams, and no company uses FaceTime.

I never realised that about FaceTime. I am surprised that other "big" names in video conference market never thought of that...

Pretty sure they realized that but they also realized that iPhone can do that due to its FaceID 3D scanning sensor.

Good luck getting non nightmarish results without it.

Maybe once ML models are trained well enough we can expect good results without FaceID.

Even without FaceID, knowing the exact geometry of the screen and camera can get you really close, which is something you can only get reliably with a vertically integrated product. Meanwhile there is no possible way for Zoom to know exactly where my webcam is on my monitor without a cumbersome setup and calibration process.

Edit: nope, I was wrong, they used FaceID sensors. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2019/07/03/io...

You can hack around this—stick your webcam behind a teleprompter, but instead of having it prompt text, mirror your display. Youtube has lots of tutorials for DIY teleprompters with some 60/40 glass and a tablet. And there are many ways you can use a tablet as a second screen. I actually did this yesterday! The problem is, now people can look you in the eye, but you can’t yet look them in the eye.

I think having video off entirely is much nicer. That's how we've done it for the last ~2 years or so, aside from some rare proposal meetings.

> But it doesn’t work with separate webcams

You can basically look at a webcam if you can put the meeting window right under it. With zoom's minimal mode this is pretty easy, and when sharing screen.

FaceTime does NOT edit your video to make it look like you're looking at the camera. The feature was tried in a beta of iOS 13 (called "FaceTime Attention Correction") but it was pulled in subsequent betas and never released to the public.

Just call a friend on FaceTime and screenshot the self view while talking and you can see that there's no automatic editing being done.

We have a control, people who have remote worked for years.

This jumps everywhere on reasons, but experienced remote workers should start getting 'Zoom fatigue' for some of these reasons.

And experienced remote workers should have already identified some of these reasons.

Or it's a new technology we are a few weeks into using and that's tiring.

Something that more people need to do with remote calls is wait after asking a question- about a few seconds or so. Unmuting can take a second and one might wait just a bit to make sure no one else starts speaking.

And also your data

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