Overcoming Zoom fatigue with active bursts

Since working from home Jake has noticed it is very easy to become sedentary. He shares how a colleague adding active bursts to team meetings has helped him overcome Zoom fatigue.

Working from home

When working from home, it is so easy to become sedentary. No more walking across the office to chat with a colleague, you just video call them instead. No more lunchtime walks into the local town to get lunch/just have a wander. You just raid the fridge instead. No more juggling mugs while making tea/coffee for the team, it’s drinks for one instead.

It’s important now more than ever, to keep the physical activity levels up. However with football and team sports temporarily banned, there’s a huge gap. I’m not the type of person who wants to put on some trainers and run for miles. So whilst working from home I needed to find some kind of physical activity that was fun for me, and more importantly allowed with the current restrictions.

Adding active bursts to meetings

Fortunately, I work with Kelly! Kelly is always a promoter of physical activity at Energise Me. During our team meetings, she got us all doing short little 5 minute bursts. These work both as a break during the team meeting and also to get us refreshed and energised. These bursts weren’t strenuous exercise. They played on our worryingly high levels of competitiveness as a team!

The first game we played was an object location type game. Kelly would tell us something we’d have to find, sometimes in a specific room, such as “An orange object in the Kitchen”. We’d then have to rush around to find something that fitted that criteria and send a picture of it over our WhatsApp chat. Points were given to the fastest person and also the most unusual object.

The second game we played was bingo, we had cards that had specific things on them, and Kelly would tell us to go do 5-star jumps or go touch the front door. Once we had done that activity we, of course, could cross that off our bingo sheet and first to get bingo wins.

Beating Zoom fatigue

At first glance, adding physical activity to a team meeting may seem like it’s only going to extend the team meeting, but by us doing some activity, and becoming more energised we become more productive and focused which stops us drifting off during the meeting. It also allows us to have some time to fully form our thoughts, opinions, and ideas, meaning when we come back together our discussions are of much more value.

Overall, having these short physical activity breaks makes our meetings much more productive, shorter and works towards our 150 minutes for that week. What’s not to like?