174: Screen Fatigue—15+ Sanity Strategies for Organizers and Participants

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. Do your eyeballs hurt? Because mind you, I started a meeting last week and I said, does anybody else here have sore eyes? There is definitely screen fatigue approaching. So many of us have been on lockdown now. Stay at home, work from home for several weeks and the number of virtual meetings that you're attending, especially if you used to work in an office, may have increased by 80% or more. For some of you, maybe it's 100%. If your kids are at home and they've started homeschooling, so many of their activities may be on the screen. Not only that, but the number of invitations to virtual trainings and summits and free webinars has seen what I feel is a 10x increase. A lot of that is so beautiful. I love the creativity and the generosity that people are sharing at this time. And the flood of different formats is just awe inspiring of what technology can do these days. We have Facebook live, Zoom streaming, online courses, family video calls. I mentioned homeschooling. Some people are doing daily huddles or evening cocktail hours with friends, virtual co working, and even watch parties where you can watch Netflix and then chat with your friends on the side at the same time. Aren't you getting a little tired? I know I am. I have a low threshold for screens in general. Even before all of this started to happen, and then as everything started to move online, this became even more exaggerated. Even before all this pandemic madness, we were getting reports from at least those of you with iPhones on screen time, how much we were on our devices throughout a given day or week. Well now that is going way, way up even with the best of intentions and I'm finding myself quite tired by it and quite fatigued. So I thought it might be helpful to share some strategies. I'm going to share at least 15 more if I think up random things for organizers, for participants, and then for while you're actually on a meeting, most of this is going to be focused on the work side of things. I figure if you're doing things for fun, that's one thing. But. But we can do our best. Because work takes up such a huge chunk of our lives, we can do our best to at least make this easier on people. Because for those of you who have been working from home or doing more virtually or remotely, or as they would call distributed companies, screen fatigue is real. And as I've been talking about this, more and more people are saying, yes, I'm feeling it too. And that's only gonna increase. In fact, there was a recent article in the New York Times, when a Home Becomes Headquarters, where even the CEO of Cisco, the company that runs WebEx, which is another online meeting facilitation tool, his name is Chuck Robbins. Even he acknowledged the difficulties. He said, I tell you, this whole teleworking thing, as much as we sell it to our customers, I'm not sure I want to do it 100% of the time. Nobody prepares for this, he said. At the same time, in that same article, the CEO of Alphabet said, it's a miracle you can run a company this way. And I totally agree. People want to connect now more than ever. They're hungry for it. A lot of us are going stir crazy. There's a loss of cultural outings. So let's just say that everything I'm sharing in this episode goes with full and total gratitude and awe at how people are creatively moving things online. Let's get into the first set of tips for organizers. Number one, fewer meetings. Oh, my goodness. All of a sudden, it seemed like the way we were working, people just shifted it online. It's too much. We already, as it was. So many organizations have too many meetings. I've described many times on this podcast how when I worked at Google, I just had a brick wall of meetings all day, every day from Monday to Friday. And as I've quoted the authors of a book called it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work, we can't get work done at work anymore. I encourage organizers schedule less meetings. Number two, decide the criteria for when video is required and highly beneficial. I can speak for myself and say that so much of the screen fatigue comes from video calls for me, specifically where I have to be on video because it involves looking a certain way, looking into this tiny pinhole of your camera for a sustained, let's say, hour without getting up, moving around. And so you're not only staring at the screen, but you can barely move. So it feels ergonomically challenging as well. Rather than a phone call where you might be able to get up, shift your eyes, look out a window, things like that. But if everything is a video meeting, you have to give this deeply concentrated, sustained attention. And if it's with your colleagues, or I mean anyone, anyone that you respect, you don't want to be seen looking away, even taking notes. People are now suddenly staring at the top of your head. It's awkward. It's different than if you were in person. So let's be more discerning about what meetings actually require video or not.

Only you can decide that as an organization. But that brings me to point number three. Give your participants a choice. Whenever I can, I like to ask the person, do you prefer audio or video? But even as I'm saying that, that's a misnomer because I never prefer video, so I'm never asking. And in fact, sometimes when participants schedule me for a video, I will write back and say, can we actually do this over the phone? And I'm honest, I don't give any fake reason. I say I'd love to get up and be able to walk around a little bit, or I've been feeling screen fatigue. I'd love to be able to just move around the house while we talk or go sit outside.

Number four, why not AB test, or at least alternate the format? So if right now you have your whole team on video calls all day, every day, oh, my goodness. I can't think of anything more tiring. Why don't you a B test. How does our team meeting go when we're all on video? How does it go when only the person speaking is on video? How does it go when we're on the phone? So maybe you're AB testing, that's trying two different versions, or ABC testing, trying three, and then get feedback. Ask, how did it go? Feel into the vibe of the communications. What was that like? I will say that for some people who aren't as experienced delivering content over video, if. Whether it's a webinar or you're presenting something, it can be disconcerting when you can't see anyone's reactions. But if you can move past that and see that the chat is active, maybe all participants don't need to be staring forward at this tiny circle on their laptop or computer the entire time. So can we give people a break or at least alternate? So if somebody loves video and cherishes it and it's just so important to the thriving of this meeting, then can you at least alternate so that the next time the people who can't stand video get a break?

Number five, record the meeting and post the audio. So many of us are using zoom and have been for a while. If you record, I always, when I deliver training or webinar, I always Post the Zoom MP4 file and the audio. This is so crucial. And even if you're doing team meetings and you want to record the meeting, for anyone who couldn't make it, give them a choice. There's no point really to watch back content over video if you don't have to, especially if it's just people's faces. I mean, as wonderful as you all look, as beautiful as you are, as exciting as that is, maybe you have the check ins of how's everybody doing on video? And then for some people, if they want to catch up on the content of that meeting, give them the chance to listen on audio so that later when they're cooking dinner for their family or commuting from the bedroom to the living room, they can listen to the audio. I also extra appreciate it when that audio is posted somewhere or embedded where I can speed it up. I used to really scoff at speeding up podcasts. My brother would listen at 2 or 3x and I just thought it was so impossible. How are you doing that? But little by little, I use overcast for listening to podcasts. I started removing extra silences. Then I'd listen at 1.2. Then I'd bump it up to 1.5. Then for certain shows where the host would speak extra slow, I'd go to 1.9. Now I listen to most content at almost 2x the speed. And I don't know what that says about me and where my brain is going and my ability to have patience when things are just at 1x the speed. But I will say that now, where we have so much online and so much to catch up on, especially during these crazy daily pivots of the times we're living in, it's going to be helpful for people who can catch up faster than even real time. As soon as I say that, I feel compelled to give you a caveat. We can't just accelerate and fast forward our whole lives all day, every day, or we're gonna go crazy. You know, I'm big on moving beyond burnout. But I do say that because especially audio. Trying to catch up on audio as opposed to just reading a transcript is overwhelming. It takes a lot of time. So that's another. We'll call that strategy 5B. You can also post transcripts of the meeting for people who prefer to read rather than even listen.

Tip number six, this is a big one. I would love if every organization would adopt this. Block off specific meeting days and times. I don't see any reason why every company could not pilot no meeting days. Whether it's no meeting days on Monday or Wednesday or Friday, what do you have to lose? Especially now, we are all coming up with new, creative, innovative ways of working. Try, for goodness sakes, try a no meeting day. I am so much more infinitely productive on my no meeting days, which for me are Mondays and Fridays. I also block off no meeting times. So no meetings before 11, with rare exception. And no meetings after 3pm Also with rare exception. So it's not going to happen with 100% adherence, let's say. But give your company, give your employees the chance to have some time to think and get into their deep work. I cover a lot of these time blocking principles in my free course, Free Up Founder Time. It is geared towards solopreneurs. But I think that organizations and leaders can. Can actually learn a lot about how to do calendar blocking in a way that everybody will benefit.

Now let's talk about what participants can do to combat screen fatigue. Number one. And again, I'm going to focus specifically on video here because that's what makes me the tiredest, the fastest. This one might seem kind of silly or strange. Number one, prep less. I've seen a lot of articles and content saying, oh, you got to feel like it's a normal day. Go get dressed. Make sure you feel like a real human being. Put clothes on. I mean, why not wear sweats? Okay. Why not be comfortable, at least from the waist down? So now everyone's in on the secret that those of us who've been working from home for a decade or more. No. Which is that we're never wearing real pants. You're always wearing sweats. The thing you have to remember is, is don't forget that if you get up to close the door or answer the doorbell or whatever, you gotta make sure. You gotta make sure you turn off your video. There was one time, it was in the middle of summer and I was so hot and we're in the studio apartment and there's no air conditioning and I'm pretty Sure. I was just wearing like boxer brief style shorts and I forgot. I got up and I don't know if the person saw anything, but I was so mortified. Sometimes I forget and I get up and I'm just wearing sweats, but I'll have this really nice shirt or sweater on top. So these are the really funny things. And now there's even more memes and hilarious moments of things that are happening while everybody's working from home. Not to mention these interesting snapshots into even news anchors homes and CEOs living rooms, wherever they're calling in from. But the reason I say prep less, and this goes especially out to the ladies, I used to put on a full face of makeup if I knew I was going to be interviewed over video. And I used to do my hair. And one time, I'll never forget this, this was back in 2010, somebody wanted to interview me for his channel, his blog. So we set up the interview and I had rollers in my hair. And when we got on the phone, I thought it was a phone interview or Skype. We got on Skype and he turned on video. And I was just taken aback. I was like, wait, what is this? Is this a video interview? And he said, yeah, I turned on video just to show him. I said, look, bro, I have rollers in my hair. Like I'm a woman. If you want a woman to be on video, you gotta give her a heads up. Because I feel that men, you don't have to do as much hair and makeup shenanigans to look a certain way. Whereas women are more conditioned by our society to have nice hair and have some general makeup on. It's like very surprising sometimes to the men in our lives. Um, I'm grateful that Michael says that he likes to be better without makeup, but if he hadn't told me that I don't, I would still be put in the full face as I used to. I was afraid at one point to leave the house without makeup. I just thought, oh my gosh, I cannot be seen in public. That's very sad. I hope that the rest of you women listening don't have that issue that I used to have. But let's just all agree to prep less for video calls. Because now these gender differences are so clear. Where this double standard where how long does it take women to get ready for work in the morning or to go. Go to an in person meeting? And how long would it take a guy? I'm not trying to stereotype, but I'm just saying in my personal experience, video creates some stress because if my hair is just thrown up in a messy bun and I don't have mascara on and I don't have lipstick, maybe I look more tired to people than a man might look who isn't used to even wearing mascara or anti shine stuff on his face or doesn't have to do anything with his hair other than just like kind of arrange it so the curls or whatever, it's not just sticking out in all directions. So let's just agree. Let's prep less. You know what, show up as you are. This is my call to all of us. Just show up as you are. I'm not saying you have to be in your sweats from the top up. You could still put on a nice shirt, you could still do five minutes of zhuzing of your hair of a light lip color. But let's forget the full face of makeup and just be as we are. And wouldn't that be a revolution to come out of this working from home period and be able to just show up a little bit more as we are. Let's start this campaign now. The second strategy for participants, see and ask. And before you even schedule a meeting, collaborate asynchronously. You can also collaborate live in Google Docs, in Google Sheets, in Asana, in Slack. Those are all the tools we use in my business, among many others. But you do not have to be on the phone to brainstorm effectively. We've done in Momentum, what I call the idea factory. We all get into a spreadsheet, we put our name, everybody claims a row, and the question prompts are across the top of the spreadsheet. And I've done this when I'm facilitating virtual trainings as well. So the prompts are already there across the top in the columns. And then everyone gets a row, they put their name in column A, and then you just brainstorm as many ideas as you can go for quantity, not quality. Everyone can be adding things in. There's no need. You need to be on video waiting for your turn to slowly chime in on something that has its benefits. But try how you can collaborate in the fantastic, incredible technology and tools that we have. Either live, maybe you're just all on a phone call and you actually mute. Wouldn't it be nice to mute the line for five or 10 minutes and not be on video and then go put as many ideas as you can in a Google Doc? So there's a lot you can do without having to just stare at the screen until your eyes you start like crying because your eyes are so dry and because you're so bored. Okay, you can tell I'm loopy. It's a Monday morning when I'm recording this. Number three, get comfortable. Rather than obsessing over visuals, I'm saying this because it's advice I need to hear. If I go on a video meeting, I used to like go out into the living room. So I would unhook my whole ergonomic setup, my dual monitor thing that I have in my office at my desk. I would not have my fancy mic and I would go arrange myself in the living room where I have these floor to ceiling beautiful bookshelves and everyone would always comment how beautiful the books were. Wow, that's so amazing. But I was not comfortable. I'm. I sit on a bouncing ball in my office, so that keeps me moving. Kind of shifts my energy a little bit. It's more fun for me. And when I go do a video call in the living room, I'm sitting on a wood bench. My laptop is propped up on a bunch of books. I don't have my external wireless keyboard or my wireless mouse. I'm just not that comfortable. But I kept doing it for the optics. So it's funny because I've seen some articles that say, oh, how to arrange your background? Just so put a plant and some fruits and some flowers. Okay, that's well and good. If you want to start to optimize your background, I'm all for it. I even considered getting wallpaper that was like fake bricks because my office is quite ugly. I have to say it's not set up yet for a really nice video background. Especially not if I'm going to facilitate a training because I'm now facilitating my keynotes virtually, of course, because we've, we've all pivoted, but so I would still probably facilitate a class out in the living room. But it's not that comfortable. So are you contorting yourself to have a good looking background or are you comfortable? I would encourage you to go for the comfort rather than obsessing over the visuals.

Fourth strategy for participants, toggle video and mute. Don't be shy. When I'm not speaking, I press mute. That way I don't feel bad about taking a deep breath. It doesn't activate zoom to pin my window to the screen, you know, so sometimes like if you just so much as shuffle and you haven't hit mute, your face gets blown up really large for other participants because it wants to shift to whoever is speaking. Speaking So I always mute when I'm not speaking and that allows me to just be free and be myself. And sometimes I will also turn my video off when I'm not speaking. I don't always ask now there in not every setting can you do that for some of you, if it's a team meeting and with your team at work, you might not want to turn off video, but could you all come up with some best practices? If you're not speaking, it's okay to turn off video, or if you need to get up and do something, just. I say experiment with that. The fifth strategy for participants. I really like having wireless headphones and I also like calling in from my phone when I can. So sometimes my headphones are plugged into my computer. But if you have wireless headphones, you can also move around a bit more in the visual field of the laptop rather or screen rather than be so tied to it. Maybe you don't want to use headphones at all and just have the audio and your input coming in and out of your computer. Without an external mic, that's fine too. It's probably a holdover from podcasting, the fact that I have headphones and a mic plugged in. But the broader point is get the tech that you need to be comfortable and move freely. This is going to be a while, and even if it isn't, you may get more freedom when this is all over to have meetings in whatever format you want or work from home more often than you did in the past. So it's not a bad thing to get yourself set up now.

Finally, we come to a couple best practices for during the meeting itself, and I have to give a shout out to my brother Tom, who's the VP at a real estate startup in San Francisco, also on lockdown. I've mentioned his amazing wife Jill, and my two nieces. So they're homeschooling and my brother's working from home and so he I asked him, you know, what's your input on how to make the most of this time and combat screen fatigue? So number one, whoever calls the meeting, make sure you create an agenda and you're the one in charge of ensuring that people follow it. This sounds obvious. Whether we were in stay at home policies or not, this is a good practice. If you call the meeting, have an agenda. My team and I use an asana task called April 2020, let's say, and then we create subtasks for agenda items. That makes it really easy to assign those subtasks after we discuss it to somebody and then easily drag and drop that subtask into whatever project board it belongs. Number two balance having organic conversations with at the same time acknowledging that that content might be important, but moving it to another time. So especially with everyone on video with so many meetings now with working from home or we're all tired, not to mention the overlying or underlying stress of this moment of just not knowing which end is up from one day to the next. So if there are organic or side conversations that start happening, don't be afraid to say this is really important. Let's set up another time for it. Or better yet, let's take this offline and collaborate in some other format. Number three make sure that invitees know whether they are required or not. This is so important. Figure out who not just which meetings are mission critical, but who is mission critical. This meeting cannot happen without so and so present. And then if you're inviting anyone else, make sure that they know it's optional. And even better, give them an option of how to catch up on the most important points or nuggets after the fact if they can't or don't want to make it live. Number four, you can encourage quieter folks by asking for their opinion. I also like in Zoom creating breakout rooms so that more introverted or quiet team members don't feel shy to speak up in front of everybody. By doing a breakout room you allow everyone to split off into discussion and breakout rooms are so awesome. You can assign them randomly or you can decide who you want talking with whom and then you can broadcast messages to everybody while they're split off in their pairs or triads. You can also when you call them back it gives everybody a 60 second warning. It's really fun. I encourage you to do this for check ins. How are you doing for brainstorming sessions for talking through sticky topics, it just makes it easier to ensure that everybody has a voice and everybody gets heard. That brings us to our last tip of this episode Number five for during the meeting. Sometimes it can be confusing when to talk when you're on video, especially if some people have moved off a video or it's an audio based call. One thing that I like to do and this has helped when we record those combination Momentum Book Club Live Pivot podcast episodes. We've done two of them so far with Charlie Gilke and Mike Michalowicz and they're a little complicated because I I come on with the guest first, I say hi to the guests, just the two of us and I have all the Participants in a waiting room. This is in Zoom. Then Momentum members can come on and they're on mute. So then I have all the guests muted, everyone from Momentum while I interview the author for the first, let's say 30 minutes. 30, 40 minutes. And momoers can chat. So I can see them chatting. I can see if they have questions. And then I bring all of them off of mute and I open it up for live Q and A with the author at the end. This is our fun way of doing the Momentum Book Club, but it can be tricky with so many people and sometimes people are shy or they both speak at once and we want to have a clean podcast recording. So how do we do that? I ask people to indicate in chat and I will even type in chat who has a kickoff question and they'll say, oh, I'm happy to go. So maybe Kevin types. I'm happy to go with the first question and then I'll write in chat. Awesome. Does anyone want to go after Kevin? So then the next person will type, I have a question. I'll go after Kevin. So we are actually figuring out in the chat who is going to go next. And that has been very helpful during our twice monthly Q and A calls. Three times if you include Pivot Insider. I'll also sometimes say, let's do. Let's go round the horn and do a check in. Even if we're just on audio. I will call out their names. So I'll say let's go in this order. Theo, Peggy, Michael, Stephanie, Liz. And I'll say the name so everyone is clear when they're going next. So it just reduces that uncertainty and even anxiety of when do you come off mute? When do you insert yourself and not be sure you're not talking over people?

There you have it, folks. This ended up being 16 strategies to combat screen fatigue. And you know I'm always interested in what works for you too, so let me know. You can email helloivittmethod.com or leave us a voice note. Pivotmethod.com Ask and share how are you combating screen fatigue during this epic time of everything moving online? Which again, I will circle back to say it is really beautiful and exciting and creative to see. I even did a Zoom with my whole family for the first time and it was so, so delightful. I was really overflowing with joy to see my whole family on video at the same time. So I get the beauty and the benefits of all of this screen time. And when it comes to the work front where we spend 80% of our week. I hope that some of these strategies can help you navigate a more long term solution for the meeting side of things. Because as the hashtag, as everyone's been saying during this crisis, it's a marathon, not a sprint. So if we start off by having every single meeting all day, every day, in every hour of the day, and they're on video, we are going to be so exhausted. If you do nothing else, I encourage you to try no meeting days or no meeting blocks of time and at least alternating the format to give everybody a chance at the format that they like the best. One last resource and I'll put these all in the show notes. I love using Uber Conference for whenever I host something. And it's audio only. Although of course Zoom is great for that too. Have a wonderful week everybody. I hope you stay safe and sane and I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.