Many of us have been working remotely for nearly a year. I’ve written often over the past year on various stages of adaptation and adjustment. Once upon a time, we all thought this situation would be temporary. Now, a year hence, some real fatigue has set in. In this article, I’ll offer my personal reflection on video conference fatigue and what to do about it.

Exhaustion

Allow me to state the obvious: hours upon hours of video conferencing is exhausting. We’ve all felt it, so that’s nothing new. What is new, is some actual science that supports our experience. Last week, Stanford University professor Jeremy Bailenson published his study, Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue. For the first time, we can attribute scientific causes to what we’ve experienced all along. If you enjoy science, read the study. I’m only going to touch on a few aspects of it here.

Eye contact

One of the reasons video conferencing is so fatiguing is because it puts you into a virtual up-close face-to-face encounter with the other participants. Double the distance between yourself and your webcam. For me, that’s about 4 feet. That’s like sitting in a restaurant booth, leaning in, and staring into the eyes of the person across from you, without having the distraction of a menu to read and food to eat.

In the real world, I’m not great at eye contact. I tend to look away to help myself think. In a physical meeting room environment, we aren’t fixated on each other’s faces. Video conferencing artificially creates an intimate face-to-face interaction. Then we do it over and over, all day, every day. Simply put, that much closeness and eye contact is very draining.

Stuck in a chair

For most of us, we need to be seated to be in the view of the webcam. In physical meeting rooms, we are typically seated there as well, so what’s the difference? Well, in an office building, you move from conference room to conference room, and take the stairs occasionally. When seated at your desk, you just click from virtual room to virtual room, never leaving your chair.

Most office workers have limited physical activity. In the virtual world, it drops to zero. Zero physical activity hampers brain activity and increases fatigue. We need to force ourselves to get physical activity in the workday. There aren’t any naturally occurring prompts to do so.

The death of the conference call

We all have a lot of video conference meetings. You know what we don’t have any more? Conference calls. What ever happened to those? Did they get tossed on the pile of obsolete technologies like the fax machine and BlackBerry?

While, I cannot say that I love conference calls, they do have a few advantages over video conferences. Back at the office, when I joined a conference call, I would don my wireless headset and go walking. I’d pace up and down the hallway, make short laps around my small office, or go for a walk outside, if the weather was nice.

I’ve learned something about myself. I think better when I move my body. Kinetic activity gets the blood pumping to my brain and makes it function better. It’s like squeezing the fuel primer bulb on an outboard motor, causing the engine to roar.

Permission

Now that we know what’s going on to make us so fatigued, it’s time to do something about it. Perhaps you knew everything I’ve talked about all along. That knowledge helps but doesn’t actually solve the problem. What do we need? Permission?

Why do we go on-camera for 9 hours a day? Mostly, because everyone else does. Sure, some of you are rebels, but many of us conform to social norms.

It’s interesting. Whenever someone isn’t on-camera in a group where others are, they often feel the need to make an excuse. Here are the common excuses I hear:

• It’s early and I’m not presentable yet.
• My internet connection is acting up today.
• I’m eating breakfast or lunch.

Those all seem like totally reasonable excuses. Allow me to create a brand new, totally legitimate excuse: I’m presentable. My internet connection is fine. I’m not stuffing my face. I just need a camera break.

I’m totally flexible as to what degree that need is. Why should we drive ourselves to the point of complete exhaustion before we do something about it? Wouldn’t it be smarter to sprinkle in camera breaks into our workdays so fatigue never sets in?

Camera-off, audio-only meetings

Here’s what I’ve started to do. I’ve established a few “camera-off” meetings. Basically, it’s a like a conference call, but using our normal video conference technology. I set the expectation up-front: I won’t be turning on my camera for this meeting. I’m not going to be sitting in front of my computer. We can accomplish the purpose of the meeting with just an audio connection, and there is no need to overstimulate ourselves. As an added bonus, I can walk around the block while we get work done.

I’ve tried this experiment with some meetings. Most of my meetings are still video, and many of them require screensharing, so I’m stuck in my chair anyway. I’ve not settled into the optimal camera-on/camera-off ratio to effectively minimize fatigue but I’m working on it.

How’s your video conference fatigue going? Any ideas you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them.

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