Today, I’m tired and achy, recovering from yesterday’s COVID booster. So I replaced my daily run with a long walk.
I continue to move.
My Twitter bio includes that I love to dance, sing, and meditate. All these are different ways to move. For me, dance evokes the very essence of movement in my body. Singing requires the movement of my vocal cords, forming moving sound waves in the air. And even meditation involves movement as I watch breath move in and out of my body.
More than life
In fact, movement is more than life. At a deeper level, everything is moving. Every lifeless atom—whether in a bar of copper, a vat of mercury, or a tank of oxygen—is constantly changing position. At the deepest level, quantum mechanics tells us that no particles in the universe are static; all exist in a probability cloud of possible positions.
I am grateful for the movement in my life, both for the joy it gives me and movement’s constant reminder that I am alive.
Providing downtime during any meeting is important, but scheduling breaks during online meetings is especially important.
What happens if you don’t schedule breaks during online meetings
Some people have the attitude that attendees at online meetings are grown-ups and they should be given the freedom to take a break when they want and/or need to. Let’s explore this.
There are times when online meeting participants need to take a break. They are working from home and their kid falls and hurts themself. Or they have to take an important call they’ve been waiting for from their boss. (Hopefully, they explained that at the start of the meeting.) Perhaps they have a physiological emergency.
You can’t do much about people who need to take a break. But, by scheduling breaks at an online meeting you can drastically reduce the number of people who want to take a break, and do so because they have no idea when they’ll next get a scheduled opportunity to take a break!
When you don’t schedule enough breaks, people will leave an online meeting seemingly at random. Sometimes they’ll do this because they need to, but the other meeting attendees don’t know this. As a result, the meeting will feel unnecessarily disjointed, and it’s easy for participants to conclude that the meeting is not so important, boring, or a waste of time. (Of course, meetings can be all these things, breaks or not! But there’s no need to make the experience worse than it already might be.)
To summarize, scheduling appropriate breaks during online meetings makes it much more likely that people will stay present and only leave if they have to.
Why attention span is especially fragile at online meetings
Let’s think about in-person meetings for a moment. Long face-to-face meetings — a conference, for example — are invariably broken up into sessions, interspersed with scheduled breaks, meals, socials, etc. We are used to building scheduled breaks into in-person meetings. And such breaks inevitably involve movement: leaving a meeting room for refreshments, moving to another location for the next session, etc.
Unlike in-person meetings, there may be very little downtime between multiple online meetings. Online meeting participants don’t have to get out of their chairs and walk to another room to join a new meeting; they just click a new Zoom link. Moreover, online meeting participants usually have no idea whether other attendees are on their first or tenth meeting of the day.
Consequently, it’s not unusual for people working remotely these days to become Zoombies (no, not this kind, hopefully). Sitting for long periods in front of a screen is a recipe for inattention. Our brains simply can’t maintain peak alertness without regular stimulation of movement (our body, not someone else’s), active engagement (e.g., answering a question, engaging in conversation), or meaningful emotional experience. In my experience, most online meetings contain very little stimulation of this type. Scheduled breaks allow us to create this vital stimulation for ourselves.
Even if a meeting facilitator is aware of the importance of scheduling breaks to maintain attention, there’s another factor that makes it harder than during face-to-face meetings.
Reading the room at online meetings
At in-person meetings, it’s fairly easy to read the room and notice that attendees are getting restless. People start to squirm a little in their seats. Their body language telegraphs they’re tired or inattentive. A good meeting leader/facilitator will see this and announce a break, or ask the group whether they can power through for another fifteen minutes.
It’s harder to read the room during online meetings because we have less real-time information about the participants. It’s difficult to judge how people are doing when all you can see is their upper body in a little rectangle on your screen. In addition, most microphones are muted, so you can’t hear people shifting around in their chairs or audible distractions nearby.
Scheduled breaks reduce the need to reliably read the room with limited audible and visual information available.
OK, so how long can people meet online without a break?
It depends. Online meetings that focus on making a single decision can, if well-designed and facilitated, be useful and over in twenty minutes. No break is needed! In my experience, though, most online meetings run 60 – 90 minutes.
If the attendees aren’t participating in back-to-back online meetings (unfortunately, increasingly common these days), it’s reasonable to schedule a 60-minute meeting without a break.
90-minute meetings are a stretch; scheduling a five-minute break around the middle will help participants regenerate.
If you feel compelled to run a longer meeting, I strongly recommend building a five-minute break into the agenda every 45 minutes.
What you ask people to do during breaks is important, and I’ll share my suggestions below.
How to schedule online meeting breaks
There are several ways to inform participants about online meeting breaks.
The most obvious is using your meeting agenda, distributed before the meeting. Simply add a five-minute break in the middle of your 90-minute meeting, or include a couple of five-minute breaks during your 120-minute meeting agenda.
Alternatively, you can announce scheduled break times at the start of the meeting. Be sure to repeat this information once any latecomers have joined.
A variant is to announce at the start that there will be breaks, say, every 45 minutes or so, but the exact time will depend on how the meeting proceeds. Ask participants to speak up if more than 45 minutes pass without a break.
Finally, you may occasionally need to schedule an impromptu break. For example, an unexpected issue arises that necessitates spending five minutes to get the data needed to make a decision. Under circumstances like this, an impromptu break may well be appropriate.
Whatever method you use to schedule breaks, periodically remind participants when a break is coming up. For example: “We have a five-minute break scheduled in fifteen minutes; let’s see if we can get everyone’s thoughts on this issue before the break.”
Directions for attendees during breaks
Finally, it’s important to give clear directions to participants before each scheduled break. Here’s what to do.
People need to be told the length of the break, and the time the meeting will continue. Display a countdown timer showing the break time remaining; this is an essential aid for getting everyone back online on schedule. If your online meeting platform doesn’t have this capability built-in, the meeting leader can share their screen during the break, displaying a large-digit timer counting down the minutes.
Suggest that people turn off their cameras and do some movement and stretching exercises, or, if there’s time, go for a quick walk. Even short amounts of movement increase our in-the-moment cognitive functioning and ability to learn. (See Chapter 4 of The Power of Participation for more information on the benefits of movement.)
If the break is for a significant amount of time, such as a lunch break, you may be giving participants some preparatory work before the meeting resumes. Before the break, provide clear instructions on what is needed. For example: “During lunch, please spend a few minutes thinking about the options we discussed this morning, and be ready to share and justify your top choice when we reconvene at 1 pm EDT.”
Conclusion
I hope this article helped explain how to schedule breaks during online meetings. As always, your comments are welcome!
Here are six ways to keep attendees comfortable and improve your event. While stuck in cramped seats during a six-hour Boston to San Francisco flight, my wife gently pointed out that I had become quite grumpy. She helped me notice that my lack of body comfort was affecting my mood. Luckily for me, Celia remained solicitous and supportive, reducing my grouchiness. Once we were off the plane my spirits lightened further.
Unfortunately, I tend to be oblivious for a while to the effects of physical discomfort on my feelings. Until I notice what’s really upsetting me, I typically and unfairly blame my irritability on innocent culprits, for example:
The tediousness of gardening because insects are swarming around my head.
The delay in waiting for my food to arrive in a noisy restaurant.
A presenter’s inability to capture my full attention while I’m sitting with my neck twisted permanently towards them in an auditorium.
I suspect I’m not alone in these errors of judgment. Pivoting to the world of events, this means if we want to give attendees the best possible experience, we need to minimize the quantity and severity of physical comfort issues that are under our control.
Here are six ways to keep attendees comfortable and improve your event. I’ll share common mistakes you’ve probably experienced, together with suggestions for mitigating their impact.
1 — Room temperature
It surprises me that many venues still can’t get this right. While I know that there’s no such animal as an ideal room temperature for everyone, the fluctuations I’ve routinely seen when rooms empty and fill during an event are often extreme and unacceptable.
There are two issues here.
First, sweltering or freezing rooms make it almost impossible for attendees to concentrate on what’s happening in the session. This is a fixable venue issue; an adequately sized and controlled HVAC plant will maintain the temperature in an acceptable range during normal changes in occupancy.
Second, if the room occupants decide that the temperature should be raised or lowered, the organizers and venue should have procedures in place to make this happen quickly. Why venues continue to distrust their customers and lock up thermostats so only hard-to-summon staff can make an adjustment (and then disappear again) baffles me. If they’re worried that clients will turn the temperature way up or down and leave the room, wasting energy, they should invest in motion detector technology that resets the room temperature when no one is in it.
2 — Noise
Along with 20% of the U.S. population, I have some hearing loss; background noise makes it challenging to hear what’s going on. As a result, playing house music during conference breaks and socials is more than a distraction; it actively impedes the utility of the event for me. (If I want to listen to music, I’ll pick my own and listen elsewhere, thank you very much.) At traditional events where most of the networking occurs outside the meeting sessions, unnecessary noise is at best a distraction and at worse a reason to leave.
Another mistake that is often avoidable is to hold multiple small groups in spaces with poor acoustics. This prevents each group from concentrating on its own conversation because of continuous interruptions by talking/laughter/applause from neighboring groups.
3 — Seating
In 2017, I facilitated Haute Dokimazo, a cool one-day conference held in The Thinkery, a children’s museum in Austin, Texas. The event was a big success, but during the closing group spective the seating was criticized. Yes, as you might expect, some of the chairs were kid-sized. This took a toll on participants’ rear ends over the day!
Even when a venue is designed for adult use, the quality of seating and poor seating layouts (1, 2) can seriously affect participant comfort. The former is a venue or production responsibility. The latter is easy to fix if you know how to set seating for maximum comfort and function.
4 — Safety
We’ve all suffered through awkward “icebreakers” that fail to introduce attendees meaningfully to each other and have no connection to desired meeting outcomes. Providing the right level of emotional comfort at an event is tricky because our best learning often occurs when we feel safe enough to take some smart risks. There are many ways to maximize learning and connection by enhancing participant safety at an event. Some of them are described here.
5 — Breaks
Have you ever felt exhausted while attending a conference, unable to properly concentrate, learn, or participate fully?
I have — and I bet you have as well.
Conference organizers often try to cram too many sessions into the time available. Attendee comfort subsequently declines, along with the quality and effectiveness of the event. It’s not hard to create meeting schedules that include sufficient downtime. If you feel compelled to squeeze everything possible into an event, tell attendees upfront what you’ve done and give them explicit permission to take breaks whenever necessary.
6 — Movement
Think about the meetings you’ve attended with lots of purposeful activity. What was your energy level like, compared to similar meetings where you sat and listened to people speak all day? Did you feel more energized, more on top of what was going on, less tuned out? Most people do.
So, these are my six suggestions to keep attendees comfortable and improve your event. Think about the amount of energy, money, and time that goes into producing and attending an event. Doesn’t implementing as many as possible of the simple suggestions above make excellent sense? You can doubtless think of other ways to improve attendee comfort — for example, streamlining registration and check-in. I welcome your additions in the comments below.
Children and adults shouldn’t sit still in class. It’s amazing that we ignore established research on ways to improve children’s learning when designing adult learning environments.
Yet meeting programs are full of sessions where attendees sit and listen for an hour or more. Attendees learn less, and long-term learning accuracy and retention deteriorate.
“Kids aren’t meant to sit still all day and take in information. Adults aren’t wired that way either.” —Steve Boyle, one of the co-founders of the National Association of Physical Literacy
For decades, I’ve seen how as little as a minute of movement added into a conference session revitalizes participants.
Children and adults shouldn’t sit still in class. It’s not hard to incorporate movement into meeting sessions. Here are four easy ways with substantial benefits.
Why aren’t you doing it?
…Or are you? Share how you incorporate movement into your meetings in the comments!
Image attribution: Screen capture from X bytes video.
Yesterday, my trusty Apple Watch told me that I had surpassed my daily move goal every day for the last three years.
Providing downtime during any meeting is 
While stuck in cramped seats during a six-hour Boston to San Francisco flight, my wife gently pointed out that I had become quite grumpy. She helped me notice that my lack of body comfort was affecting my mood. Luckily for me, Celia remained solicitous and supportive, reducing my grouchiness. Once we were off the plane my spirits lightened further.