Stanford study into “Zoom Fatigue” explains why video chats are so tiring

To me it seems like the same thing that happens in real life; People are doing more talking than listening and end up repeating themselves.

I easily get around this by point blank refusing to video calls for meetings. Audio calls should be sufficient, should be limited to the smallest possible number of relevant people and should have a clear meeting agenda and someone to drive it.

I got a little pushback about it at the start of the pandemic and working from home, but since then everybody else in the meetings I attend (around 10 people for my largest weekly meeting) has turned their cameras off too, and we now get through the agenda much quicker.

YMMV of course.

My personal experience using video conferencing software was always a feeling of heightened anxiety. I now default to either hiding the view of the other participants with another window (maybe only making visible one participant at a time) or completely minimise the window, so I can focus only on the audio. If I don't do that, I cannot concentrate and spend more staring at faces rather than actively listening.

This reads more like speculation on many confounding factors, than any explanation. Any factor could be fatiguing or defatiguing.

Having just done two video interviews of about an hour's length each, I found them far more tiring than a normal interview of the same length.

My problems are mostly:

- ppl not wearing good headsets

- interrupting ppl because of the lag