Are your Zoom meetings on Middle Class Standard Time?

Many of our teams have shifted to Zoom, and despite the obvious reasons this would be a bad idea, I have found myself trying to fit in the same amount of content in weekly staff meetings and now-online trainings.

Even though it is way more taxing to stare at six people on a screen for two hours than to be with them for that amount of time in real life.

And even though, for three weeks now, any big conversations we try to take on after the first ninety minutes just get punted to the next week.

One more example: Last week, facilitating an “online training 101” workshop for 85 people, I noticed both of us trainers were rushing. We were rushing through three important tips for people new to online training, to get to the part where we modeled an online body sculpture, so that we could then get to modeling a closed-eye process. We could have simply dropped one of those things, which would have kept the participants (and us) from feeling rushed.

And if those examples don’t ring true for you, perhaps you’ve heard meeting leaders like me say something like this:

“As you can see, we’re packing a lot in today”

“We’re going to have a working lunch today to make sure we get through everything”

“Wow! We’re going to…