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The very first installment of this column opened with a reminiscence about the magic of conference calls, followed by one of my key rules of management: Most video conferences should be phone calls, and most phone calls should be emails. I’m no longer a manager, and in fact no longer have a real job at all, but being mostly unemployed has only strengthened my commitment to this philosophy.
In my old life, an average day consisted of somewhere on the order of seven to 10 Zoom meetings. By evening, I was routinely too exhausted to hold a normal conversation with my spouse, much less join the many invites for online drinks and rounds of trivia and birthday parties and so forth that became the norm during the pandemic. Zoom fatigue is real, and companies and managers need to do a much better job of preventing video chats from monopolizing employees’ work lives. These days, I have maybe one video meeting a week, roughly 2 percent of my previous total, and that reduction alone has made me feel more sane than I had in months.