The year is something like 2021 and by now 98.3% of the world has experienced the joys of video calling for work. I'm not sure of the specifics of either of those details but they feel right enough to call them facts.

You enter call number 6 clutching coffee number 7 wondering when you last ate. One by one the virtual room fills with familiar, friendly faces and you engage in small talk before the meeting begins. You get a glimpse into your colleagues' lives. You might hear about their fun weekend 🍻, their sick kid 😢, or their new puppy 🐶. Ok that last one is all me; I got a new puppy and just wanted to share a photo of the cuteness.

With a well intentioned but clumsy segue the small talk winds down, the meeting starts up and you talk shop for a while. 🗣. You think big thoughts. You solve big problems. Then you part ways and leave the call. 

And you feel tired. 

You haven't physically moved much today (with a furrowed brow you try to remember when you last made it outdoors before realising that is a tricky thought to pursue; let's put a pin in that) so it's not that kind of tired. The post-meeting coffee is already coursing through your veins and the total caffeine now could motivate a sloth to dance a merry jig so that's probably not why you're tired either. 

And yet it's hard to escape the fatigue that hits from too many video calls. There's a few theories as to why they are so draining, including increased cognitive load due to latency and less than perfect audio but I'm beginning to think it's void. Or to better describe it, the problem is the lack of a void. 

It feels like the unwritten rule of video calls is that someone has to be talking at all times.

Video calls seem to invite people to fill every second like radio DJs desperately trying to avoid any dead air. If there's the slightest pause, I'm gonna assume your connection has frozen so please don't stop talking for a second. It's fine to think but you must be making sounds while you're thinking so I know you're still there. 

So averse to a bit of silence that we even have to narrate ourselves when we're not talking... 

This isn't pointed at anyone I work with since I'm guilty of filling the void and my team are great (I have to say that; they might read this). It just seems like a natural urge to always have someone talking to overcome the unnatural thought of silence on a video call.

Some companies have silent reading time in meetings; structured, dedicated time to study the agenda in unison. That sounds pretty appealing. But I wonder if we could take video calls a step further and enforce silence at other times.

Since technology is the cause of the problem maybe technology can offer the solution. (Thinks every tech bro, ever. Puts penny in the jar 🪙) 

I'd love to see video calling tools offer live stats on talk time: perhaps the percentage of dead air in a meeting is a proxy metric indicating how calm it is and how likely you can have deep, uninterrupted thoughts. 

I'd love to see a pie chart next to the other participants' videos showing who is dominating the conversation and whose voice isn't being heard.

I'd love it if talk time was like a stamina bar in computer games. When you chat too much your volume is lowered until you can't be heard. Pipe down for a bit and your volume will be restored. 

For this meeting you each have 300 words before you're ejected from the meeting. Use them wisely!

You'd be forgiven for thinking I'm one of those meeting-haters but I actually quite like most of them. My meetings tend to provide good value. They tend to be productive. They tend to provide much needed social interaction and help build personal connections. 

But I do think video calls overall would be less tiring if we subconsciously stopped trying to trim all the dead air from them.