Sick of Video Meetings? This New Tool Will Help You Avoid “Zoom Fatigue”

With many shifting to remote work in 2020 and continuing into 2021, video meetings are now a part of everyday life for a lot of us. According to our recent survey, 37% say they’ve been working from home and meeting via video call, and 69% of those say they’ve felt what has come to be known as “Zoom Fatigue.”

Whether you use Teams, Zoom, Skype, Slack, or any video conferencing platform, back-to-back video meetings can make you feel drained, tired, and stressed. Stanford University is studying the impacts of “Zoom fatigue” and what contributes to it. They’re currently monitoring whether it can have an impact on life outside of work, like feeling too tired to do other daily tasks, or even impacting our eyesight.

In our survey, we asked respondents if they’d like something that could scan their calendar and warn them of video call fatigue BEFORE it hits - and 73% said yes.

To combat “Zoom Fatigue”, we’ve built a tool that works with Google Chrome to measure how many hours of meetings are in your Google Calendar. It will warn you if you’re likely to feel video call fatigue during the day and week.

91% of survey respondents say two hours is the most they would want to spend in video meetings each day. With this in mind, our tool flags two hours of meetings as a low chance of getting video call fatigue, and anything above four hours as a high chance.

The tool can only see how many meetings you have, how long they are, if there’s a Zoom or Google Meet video meeting link included, and if you’re attending. It can’t see the agenda, who is invited, or any other information.

Our extension also offers tips on how to alleviate video call fatigue. In our survey, 30% of people say they’ve canceled a meeting because of feeling “Zoom fatigue”, and while limiting meetings is one way to combat the feeling, there are other helpful things that can be done that won’t interrupt workflow or meeting deadlines:

• Turning off video and doing voice-only meetings
  • 63% of our survey respondents said they find this helps with video call fatigue
• Hiding your camera view so you can’t see yourself
• Evaluating whether meetings are truly needed or if the agenda can be discussed via email instead

While these tips can help, our new Chrome add-on automatically helps you fight video meeting fatigue by scanning your calendar to see how many meetings you have this week and if you’re likely to feel fatigue.

Download our new tool here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-call-fatigue/onolabholinpehbahmfanpndlkfpenli

We hope this Chrome Extension helps you feel less tired and stressed while juggling video meetings with other day-to-day tasks. If your internet is struggling to keep up with video call meetings, consider upgrading your internet plan.

If you found this tool helpful, let us know in the comments below!

We surveyed 1,000 people in March 2021 about their video meeting experiences and analysed the findings for this report.

Sources used:

1. Stanford University “Stanford Researchers Identify Four Causes for ‘Zoom Fatigue’ and Their Simple Fixes”, February 2021.

This tool is not affiliated with Zoom.

By installing, using, or otherwise accessing the Video Call Fatigue browser extension (“Extension”) and related services (the “Service”), you agree to these Terms of Service.

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Updated 7 July 2021