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Ask HN: How are you coping with wall to wall Zoom meetings?

1 points by closeparen ↗ HN
I’ve long been in the mindest of gutting it out through the long emergency until things get better. But now that so many people are excited about remote work, it seems like back-to-back Zoom meetings all day will remain the central experience of “having a white-collar job” until I’m able to retire. The days I spend collaborating with remote workers leave me in pretty bad shape by the time the last call disconnects. I find I’m not able to relax and enjoy the evening, or to transition into being productive on anything else (work or personal). I just feel like shit.

It seems many people on HN actually love this kind of life. Do you feel similar effects? How do you manage them?

7 comments

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MattGaiser
At least in my case, I have avoided the meetings when I can and just phase out when I cannot avoid them. It is background noise. I never want to go back to an office, but that would be miserable if I actually needed to do a lot on Zoom.
triyambakam
What type of role do you have? It also really depends on the company. I am an IC SWE and at most have 2 meetings a day, and sometimes none.
closeparen
I am an IC SWE. I need to collaborate with stakeholders and product managers about what we are building next, with peers about their proposed designs, with junior colleagues about how to accomplish their tasks, with org-level working groups for design and postmortem reviews, 1:1s with each of the managers whose worlds I’m involved in, inbounds from outside the org and internal strategy to deal with exogenous changes, 1-3 interviews a week, occasional outage firefighting, etc.

Do you not?

db48x
Get people to send you email instead of getting into a video conference. It sounds like you are way out on the far end of the bell curve, though a lot may depend on your exact job description. Most people probably don’t have that many meetings. Personally, I have one video conference a week. Even that one meeting isn’t truly mandatory; I can miss it from time to time if I need to.
yuppie_scum
Put “busy” blocks on your calendar so people don’t schedule you all day long.
quantified
Stand or pace your space frequently. If you remember hour-long conference room meetings, standing after a while was OK. You may need to rethink your camera and studio setup. You just don’t want to fill the camera with crotch where your face was.

And block off calendar with “meeting” and “1:1” meetings for breaks. It’s not just the zoom, we end up sitting for longer stretches because it’s all scheduled tightly at one desk. Wfh is the least healthy of work enviroments if you get stuck.

I’ve got days of 6-hour zoom stretches, worse for my mgt. Hope that’s worse than everyone else, otherwise this new world really sucks.

supersync
I regularly ask at the start of meetings to take a quick water/bathroom break

Almost everyone appreciates it and does the same

If possible, I go off camera and make it a “walk & talk” so we both get some time outside