How to avoid virtual and in-person business meeting fatigue

Better busy than bored, right?

If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, you’re not alone. I came across a recent study, where Microsoft found that the amount of time we all spend in meetings has tripled since 2020.

An 8 a.m. Zoom from home, a 9 a.m. coffee meeting, a 10 a.m. office meeting, an 11 a.m. Teams call from the office and an 11:30 a.m. Zoom from the car ... and that’s just the start of the day.

Welcome to the modern workplace, where calendars are full, muting and unmuting is a daily strategic choice, and juggling is a critical business skill.

In pre-pandemic times, most meetings happened in-person. Sometimes at an office, and other times at a restaurant or coffee house—a meeting meant making your way to a physical place to connect face-to-face.

Every so often a conference call would come up, but even those were often conducted in the formal setting of conference rooms.

Life was simple.

But with the dawn of a global pandemic, the definition of a meeting quickly changed.

Within a few days of the start of the pandemic all meetings became “Zoom” meetings.

With everyone stuck at home, virtual meeting platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet combined old-school conference calls with video to keep our calendars full. Efficient, easy to do from anywhere with an internet connection, and low cost, virtual meetings kept business going and kept us safe.

“Zoom fatigue” set in, but with every meeting taking place from the comfort of your home, things were manageable.

But as the pandemic faded, our work-lives changed once again.

No longer are our calendars filled exclusively with pre-pandemic style in-person meetings or exclusively pandemic style virtual meetings—our calendars are now filled with a mix of both.

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On a typical day, I have a combination of Zooms and face-to-face meetings that occur anywhere from an office to a coffee shop, to my car.

This new meeting paradigm has been both good and bad.

On the plus side, I’ve liked having the choice between face-to-face and virtual meetings. It’s the best of both worlds.

But on the negative, it can sometimes feel like meeting chaos.

The downtime I used to have between in-person meetings is often filled up with virtual meetings that I can do while on the go. It’s efficient but hectic.

As the virtual and in-person meeting juggle has become the way of the world, I’ve been trying to find ways to find a balance and to make sure no matter what the format, meetings are productive, and work is manageable.

It’s taken awhile, but here’s the what’s beginning to work for me.

• I have embraced meetings as a critical part of work. Whether face-to-face or virtual, internal or external, I’m one of the rare people who actually enjoy meetings.

• With so many meetings, it’s easy to forget to clearly define an agenda with a purpose for each one. Even if the purpose is simply to network or get to know someone, clearly defining the reason for meeting will help make it time well-spent.

• I always turn on video for virtual meetings, except when I am driving. Forcing others to watch me drive is distracting.

• Sticking with the theme of not distracting other attendees, when doing Zooms at coffee houses, I always used a headset and blur my background.

• It’s sometimes hard to switch contexts when doing back-to-back meetings. To make it easier, I’ve learned to make notes before a meeting on the topics to cover and then update my notes at the end of the day.

And finally, I try to send a follow-up summary of every meeting. This not only helps me, but I figure it may be helpful to everyone else who’s juggling their own cycle of meetings.

These strategies will hopefully help me manage and master my modern meeting schedule, at least until AI develops a new way for us to gather. Until then, meeting adjourned.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How to avoid virtual and in-person business meeting fatigue