If your days have been looking like this…
…you might find this to be a breath of fresh air.
Starting Friday, July 3, 2020, the university is implementing a Zoom-free* Fridays policy for the rest of the summer (through Friday, September 4), and asking cabinet members to encourage their teams to adopt the approach as they model the behavior themselves.
* This also applies to other video-based meetings, like Teams, Skype, etc.
You might be thinking, “But Friday, July 3, is a university holiday.”
It is, which makes it the perfect time to start establishing the practice and building some muscle memory.
This policy does not prevent colleagues from using time on a Friday to pick up a phone to talk to each other, send an email, write a note, or have a friendly, socially distant face-to-face conversation in a spacious area. It is simply a way to give our eyes and minds a Zoom break and open up a wider space to get other things done, once a week.
Does this mean that your regularly scheduled Friday morning Zoom meeting should be wedged into the heavy traffic of the rest of your Zoom-filled week? Not necessarily… we invite you to consider this an invitation to reconsider how and why—and through what medium—you have your meetings, not just on Friday, but every day.