Zoom fatigue is real!

With most of the world currently fighting the pandemic, and major cities under lockdown, including Singapore, one of the few ways for people to connect with each other, whether professionally or personally, is through the use of the various video conferencing apps and softwares like Zoom, Skype, Cisco WebEx and many more.

I use Zoom exclusively as do my workplace and my colleagues for meetings, webinars and seminars. And I have been using Zoom a lot to the point where I think I may be suffering from Zoom fatigue.

Zoom fatigue is real. It’s when you are sick and tired of staring at your screen or camera talking and socialising with people across the world wide web via digital bytes all day long. And you can’t help it as that is the only way to see each other face to face and hold meetings, conferences, seminars and even lectures. They are not physically there in front of you. They are just in a tiny square on your screen trying to talk to you, trying to contend with latency and poor audio quality.

Right now, here is my typical work schedule when it comes to Zoom session in a typical week:

Meetings with colleagues on Tuesdays and Wednesday afternoons, with webinars organised on a daily basis in the mornings and a large seminar on Friday afternoons. On top of that I am taking courses to upgrade myself organised by my company that I work with and that is is held on Monday’s and Tuesday afternoons which can last up to two hours each session, coupled with hour-long tutorials for both courses held on Thursdays.

In other words, I have Zoom session for hours on practically every single day and that is excluding my personal Zoom sessions with friends that I organise occasionally during in the evenings.

As an introvert, there are just too many Zoom sessions I am attending on a typical week and I feel so tired and drained, having to listen to people talk and talking to people in front of a screen. With such a schedule that I currently have, I am quite amazed that I haven’t gone crazy yet. And being cooped up at home is not making the situation any better.

And now that it’s been a while since I started ‘Zooming’, I am starting to feel a sense of dichotomy during this lockdown period. On one hand, recently, I am starting to see Zoom sessions as revolting, but I cannot stand the fact that if I missed one of the less important Zoom sessions, I feel like I am missing out on something important. I know that it’s ok to say no to these Zoom sessions for the sake of mental health, but Zoom is now ubiquitous in the working world and like I mentioned, it is the only way to communicate with your colleagues on a professional level. And so how can you say no to that?

Can we have a Zoom ‘lockdown’ period every once in a while, saying no to Zoom on certain days, so that I can gather my sanity back?