5 steps to deal with meeting fatigue and working too many hours.

In a recent blog post, Jared Spataro highlighted that in a recent study it was found that remote collaboration is more mentally challenging than in-person collaboration. Specifically, brainwave patterns associated with stress and overwork were much higher when collaborating remotely than in-person. A second study found that brainwave markers associated with overwork and stress are significantly higher in video meetings than non-meeting work like writing emails. Spataro later went on to say that due to high levels of sustained concentration, fatigue begins to set in 30-40 minutes into a meeting.

Now more than ever, it is important to get a hold of your meetings, to-dos, focus time, deep work and more to ensure you don't overwork yourself. Here are 5 steps to deal with these challenges.

Step 1: Analyze MyAnalytics and create your own plan

MyAnalytics provides insights into two of the key factors in personal productivity: how you spend your time and who you spend it with. By using MyAnalytics, you can accomplish a few things: get more focus time (more on that later), improve your relationships in your network and improve your work-life balance (or work-life harmony as I like to call it)

The first thing you can do when looking at your analytics is to deep dive on the amount of focus time. Now you can ask yourself questions such as: is my number of focus times per week sufficient, which days do I mostly lack focus time, am I spending too much time on writing vs reading e-mails, etc.? The 2nd thing you can do is double click on your wellbeing stats; are you working too many after hours, am I collaborating with others during after-hours and/or am I on too many meetings during after-hours?

Step 2: Let MyAnalytics schedule focus time for you

Based on your conclusions above, it is time to set focus time on your calendar. In these days of working from home we tend to be more productive than even, but often this also means we are working too many hours without any focus time or time away from our devices.

Focus hours can be spent on...well... focus hours. To me, focus hours are time for deep work or even time to do something completely different such as taking a bike ride, have a walk, run some errands or something else non work-related.

MyAnalytics can automatically schedule focus hours for you. Simply select 'config settings' in MyAnalytics and enable the Focus Plan to enable automatic focus hour blocks on your calendar.

Step 3: Manage your to-do list with Planner

Not too long ago I read a great blog (which I'd love to credit here, but I cannot seem to find it anymore) that explained a great way to leverage Microsoft Planner to manage your To Do's. In one sentence Microsoft Planner is a simple, visual way to organize teamwork that is mainly created for project management.

I use it to manage my To Do's and have created 4 'buckets' to keep track of my work. These buckets are based on the Inbox Zero method that I've been using for the past 8-10 years to keep my inbox clean. (for the Dutch readers, I wrote a blog about this method a couple of years ago which can still be found here)

• To Do: a big bucket of all the to-do's that pop up in my mind during the day, to-do's that come from meetings, conversations, and so on. You can see it as my little notebook where I keep a bunch of stuff that I want to do. These to-do's get transferred to the 'This Week' bucket once I'm ready to work on them.
• Today: this is where I place all my to-dos for the day. These get transferred from the 'This Week' bucket every day based on my planning for the day or their urgency.
• This week: these to-dos get transferred from the To Do bucket every Monday morning when I start planning for my week.
• Waiting: To-dos on my list, but where I need to wait for someone else to perform an action.

As you can tell by my screenshot below, I have also color coded the To-dos. Red is for External, Green is for Internal and Blue is for Personal. (I use similar colors for the meetings on my calendar in Outlook)

Step 4: Use Together Mode in meetings

The Together Mod in Microsoft Teams was just announced and is coming real soon. Together Mode is more than just another fun way of seeing the people your meeting with on your screen. People in Together mode know where others are in a shared virtual space. That means your brain can keep track of what other people are signaling or emoting in a natural way, relying on social/spatial perception; people can intuitively signal each other nonverbally. In a grid, you don’t know where other people are on the screen, relative to you, from their point of view, so natural glances and other subtle cues are impossible.

Together Mode will not work for whiteboard session, or sharing PowerPoint decks, but you will get the most out of this feature during meetings where multiple people speak, many people have their video feed on, when being attentive is crucial (think workshops or educational settings) or when a presenter needs to monitor the attendees for attention or energy.

Step 5: Stick to the plan and build habits

So by now you have analyzed your MyAnalytics, scheduled focus time, ensured that you do not work too many hours, have you to-dos in place and getting even more out of your video meetings in Microsoft Teams. Now it is time to build your habits! Although building habits should be a whole blog by itself, there are some things you can do to ensure behaviors turn into habits.

If your goal is to bring down the number of meeting hours you are on, you can start saying 'no' to meetings with clear gives/gets or an agenda (I have started saying no to 90% of the meetings that are over 45 minutes or at least challenging the host to shorten a meeting), avoid multi-tasking during meetings or maybe even dividing meetings between yourself and a peer. Start small with only a few behaviors to keep it simple and celebrate and share all your (small) victories and practices.

I am hoping you got some valuable information from this article, but even more I would love to hear from you how you are protecting yourself from meeting fatigue and pro-actively attacking this concept. I am looking forward to reading your comments below.

-Michel