Zoom Fatigue & Taco Rocks

May 28, 2020
2 min read

Updated: Sep 4, 2020

Admit it. My new dry erase thought bubble headband speaks the truth. Even before COVID sent everyone packing to their home offices, we've all endured meetings that could have been easily covered with a detailed email.

In my prior life, working in a nimble and small advertising agency, we rarely had actual meetings. There were rapid fire conversations across the office with multiple people and we were small enough that most of the time no one had to leave their desk.

We'd visit our clients, often larger, more bureaucratic and with multiple divisions and hear eye rolling stories from our clients about being stuck on a meeting-go-round, or my favorite, having to have a meeting about how to have a meeting. We said we feel their pain then returned to our office, blasted music and yelled across the office.

Flash forward to my post-agency life...corporate marketing roles in more traditional industries like legal and technology. And meetings. So many meetings. In our new-ish pandemic era where Zoom fatigue is a real thing, I've found some helpful ways to stay engaged and connected to my teammates. This article from the Harvard Business Review offers some good tips on how to avoid melting your brain. One thing that struck me in this article is the observation that in an old-school, in-person meeting, we wouldn't stare at people for the entire duration of the meeting. That would be exhausting, not to mention, super creepy. A few other activities I've done that I find helpful are...

Netwalking: Take a walk in-person with a co-worker or a new networking contact that you'd normally get to know over a cup of coffee. This also works with co-workers who are remote. Be sure to take a few minutes to socialize, share what you see and get some fresh air. Record the call so you don't have the stress of taking notes and an enjoy the time outside.
Ask for help: Everyone is in a weird head space these days. Life is a whole different kind of stressful, whether it's concerns about your job, your family, homeschooling, feeling isolated...there's a whole spectrum of issues going on inside all of us. Don't be afraid to reach out to a friend, a colleague or your boss to ask for help. That can be in helping to re-prioritize your workload, get an outside opinion on a work issue, taking time off or just having someone confirm you're not going to implode.
Craft: This could be any number of things...I find that when I'm on calls where I'm doing more listening than talking, like team update calls, I find doing something with my hands prevents me from distractions and multi-tasking, like checking email. For me, I've found unexpected joy, focus and stress relief in painting rocks. Especially when the rock looks like a taco. Or, when times are tough, I came up with what I call, Rage Crafting which included creation of this NSFW rock painting. Pardon my French.