Zoom Fatigue? 3 tips for less stressful Zoom meetings

If you're reading this, the chances are you're one of the 300 million+ daily users of Zoom, contributing to the 3.3 trillion minutes of Zoom meetings happening every year🤯

But spending this much time of your day on video calls comes with a new type of occupational health concerns that can only be explained by the term "Zoom Fatigue". Have you ever jumped from one Zoom call to another for hours straight, left with a unexplainable tiredness after finishing the last call for the day? I know I've been there😅

I want to share with you 3 actionable tricks that I use in my day-to-day to lessen the load of of video calls and to avoid "Zoom Fatigue"

1 - Zoom and Walk

Science has proven time and time again how important and healthy walking is for us humans. But, I'm sure if you're reading this, you spend way too much time in front of screen because you're stuck on Zoom calls all day.

Well try taking a zoom call while you're on a walk. Of course, don't do this for an important client meeting😅 but if there is a weekly team meeting that you know you will spend most of the time listening, grab your phone and headphones and step outside!

You'll notice how your brain even works better and you might have some interesting insights into the topic that you may have not had if you were sitting in that same old chair.

Even better, if you're in a position to do so and if it's appropriate, invite your entire team to do the meeting while walking. Maybe this will lead to the breakthrough your team was looking for all along with these weekly meetings😉

2 - Use a meeting timer

Now, I understand many meetings are not possible to do if you're away from the computer. But let's think why you are feeling so fatigued from meetings?

It may be that you simply have your entire schedule filled with online meetings non-stop. In this case, sorry! I'm not sure how to help you other than telling you maybe you should look at different positions which may require less meetings thought the day...

But for the majority of us, I think one of the biggest sources of fatigue is "unexpectedly long Zoom calls". These are mostly internal team meetings which is scheduled for a certain time, but end up going way over the slotted time because everyone's on the same team.

I say this is doing more harm than good.

At the end of the day, meetings are a means to an end; the end being doing "deep work" that actually counts towards moving your business objectives!

For me, the best way to keep a meeting on-track and ending at the actual time is by using a progress timer graphic (with the SPX plugin of course)

You just plug in the ending time of the meeting, and the timer graphic will automatically display a progress bar on the top of your screen for everyone to see.

3 - Hide your face (without turning the camera off)

Searching online, a recurring reason for Zoom fatigue seems to be that people are tired of showing their face on the webcam every single day. Of course, having the video on is a HUGE benefit when it comes to making remote work feel more natural and to connect with clients virtually, but I understand the fatigue that might come with the expectation to keep the camera on at all times.

But the problem with turning off the camera outright is that Zoom treats non-video participants differently than video participants, so others might not even notice that you're in the meeting, which is not something that we want.

But Is there a good middle ground? Well yes there is🫡

This little hack with the SPX Graphics plugin is a neat one, as it overlays a fullscreen, branded message over your entire video so you don't have to worry about putting on makeup or work pants😂 And the best part? It's absolutely free to copy. Just takes a few minutes to set up:

1. Add SPX Graphics to Zoom using this link -> https://app.spxzoom.com/install

2. Open a new meeting (to test), turn your camera on, and then locate the Apps tab from the toolbar. You should see SPX Graphics for Zoom then click on it

   
   

   

   
   

3. Locate the graphics named FULLSCREEN. If you click on the toggle button, the graphic will play with the example text (usually meant for when you're away from keyboard, hence the "be right back" text)

   
   

   

   
   

4. Now time to customize! Open the settings by clicking on FULLSCREEN. Write your name and message in the text fields. Make sure the countdown option is set to "None" since you want this to play continuously. Finally, you have the option to add your company's logo (using own logos is a Pro feature) so do that if you want to look even more professional. Press play again and you should see something like this covering your entire video:

And there you go! Click around in the app to find more ways to customize the look of the graphics with themes and colors. In addition, there are lots of additional graphics and themes you can purchase from the store, which will change the way you use Zoom completely... But that's a story for another post😅

Thanks for reading through and I really hope some of these tips can ease your Zoom fatigue!

Check out our other blog posts for more useful Zoom tips and tricks! Also, we post about once every other week so make sure to check back once in a while for new content👍