Blue Ridge Technology

You’re not imagining it, video calls ARE stressful Lots of folks were talking about “Zoom fatigue” in the early days of the pandemic: for reasons no one could quite pinpoint, Zoom meetings just seemed to drain the life and energy out of participants. (By the way, it’s not Zoom’s fault: this kind of fatigue seems endemic to video calling in general, not because of some specific bug on one platform.) Well, we’ve moved on from the pandemic, but the remote and hybrid work has stuck with us. And for many of us, so has an overabundance of video meetings. New Study Confirms Zoom Fatigue Is Real If you do a lot of video calls, then you probably don’t have a hard time agreeing with the premise. We all kind of feel this to be true — but it’s tough to take action without real evidence. Now we have it. Some Austrian minds put together a scientific study to look at what happens to our brains during videoconferencing. Here’s how they did it. They set up two groups of university students, wiring the...

Is app overload slowing down your team? In today’s business landscape we’re all obsessed with productivity. And that’s a good thing, in theory: getting more done in less time is one of the factors that drives progress at every level, and it can help you get ahead of your competition. But is there such a thing as too much productivity? We say yes. We’ve seen this over the past few years with employee burnout: especially in the digital or knowledge economy, it’s possible to push people too far. Their bodies can keep working, but their brains have hit max capacity. And there’s another way we see this problem showing up: too many “productivity” apps. We’re Using Too Many Apps Go to the website for any business software or app you like, and search for the word “productivity.” With almost no exceptions, you’ll always find it. Every single app on the internet promises to make your team more productive. And there’s a sense in which it’s true: if your team is currently doing business out of pap...