How to be focused during zoom meetings with colleagues?

Question

Sometimes zoom meeting takes a long time. When it takes more than an hour, you just lose focus and may miss smth important.. Need any advice!

Olga Tyagunova · Accepted Answer

First, you should always sit with the camera turned on. Secondly, you need to take breaks for more than an hour of continuous conversation

Slava Bobrov · Answer

It helps to set up a timer for the meeting. It turns out that we don't need exactly 1 hour meetings and a lot can be resolved in 30-45min or even less. Having a timer that reminds everyone that the meeting is not endless brings focus on getting to the outcome faster.

Dünya Yavaş · Answer

After an hour of meeting, having a quality break (get some fresh air, breathing exercise etc) help us to gain our focus again.

Elizaveta Karelina · Answer

@olga_tyagunova thanks! I think sometimes turned on the camera doesn't help. Not everybody paying attention to what you are doing there and you may use it 😅

Elizaveta Karelina · Answer

@slava_bobrov Good idea! I will try

Elizaveta Karelina · Answer

@nicolaas_spijker Thanks!

Nico Spijker · Answer

There is this Stanford News article that is absolutely amazing and provides some solid tips regarding this:

https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/

It looks at why you are losing focus and some steps that you can take in order to avoid it, many of the tips I haven't seen anywhere actually. For example taking more distance because of the cognitive habit of having more distance in natural conversations.

Besides that you should also always look at why meetings are taking so long, maybe instead of doing 1 big weekly meeting doing 2 separated shorter meetings over the week allows you to get more out of them!

Hope this helps :)

Isabel Nyo · Answer

As an engineering manager, I do a lot of 1:1's every week on Zoom. What works for me in 1:1s is keeping the camera on and looking at the other person, in a full screen mode.

For team/group meetings, I usually take notes to stay engaged.

Marina jedi · Answer

5 min breaks. or take a notes of everything and do not look in instagram ^)

Viorica Vanica · Answer

for zoom calls - I guess to keep your camera on and know exactly when it ends and what is the outcome of every call you have. When it comes to know how to increase your focus in general, I found this video very helpful - Dr.
Andrew Huberman is a professor at Stanford and he recently launched his podcast where he explains how to hack motivation, focus from the neurological point of view - totally worth to watch it until the end
 Huhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG53Vxum0as&t=400s

Marlet Kervolin · Answer

I think meetings should not last more than an hour. Because you can stay focused on what you're doing, but after an hour, you often become less focused.

Of course this is my personal point of view. We applied this in my startup and we are much more efficient 🙂

Aine Kavanagh · Answer

I struggled with this and I think turning your camera on helps, but then on the other hand, it leads to more burnout (standford just brought out a study on this). I try to have a clear agenda, know why I'm there and what I need to add and where. Also do you need to be in these meetings? Sometimes these long meetings have lots of people, but that aren't needed for the whole duration, or not needed at all. Interested to hear more about your experience!

Franck Auzanneau · Answer

I use a video call app dedicated to remote selling that optimize my focus on the meeting. Solutions like zoom, teams.. was good during the first period of the pandemic but now there are a lot of others solutions.

Eugene Hauptmann · Answer

Ah, great question, here are might goto steps in making zoom meeting productive:

*on the business side:*
- don't schedule calls that could have been an email.
- create call agenda and share it with participants before the meeting (at least  24 hours before)
- outline what questions you'll be asking and what sort of support you need from your participants
- if anybody else will speak besides you, assign talking points to them in your agenda
- keep the call short under 30 minutes
- create call summary once you're done
- follow up with participants same day (within few hours) after the call

*on the personal side:*
- be well rested
- be fresh
- be motivated to have this call
- add call reminders 1 hour before the call
- do less calls (leave only important zoom calls)
- delegate non-important zoom calls

Dimitris Karavias · Answer

Either find more interesting colleagues or raise the issue of long meetings with the team!

How to be focused during zoom meetings with colleagues?

Replies