Why is it so hard for people to come off mute on video calls?

For the life of me, I’ve never understood this. I think the real reason is that oftentimes people are multi-tasking on video calls, i.e. reading articles, sending emails, looking at social media or whatever, and they just listen for their name, and when their name pops — especially among the “Socratic Method” managers — then they need to get back to the video call screen and unmute, which can take a few seconds. (This happens to me a few times per day, if not more.) As for beginning to talk when you’re on mute, I don’t personally do that a lot, but I guess it’s just people not checking their status or being truly focused on other stuff. The amount of actually locked-in people on a given video call is typically under 15%, and I might be generous on that stat.

I guess Microsoft has a new feature where you hit spacebar and something else to briefly come off mute, thus mimicking the concept of a walkie-talkie. I’m not sure that’s going to solve many problems, but if later-stage tech has showed us anything, it’s that meaningless solutions to easily-solvable problems are the best way to claim you were productive in a given quarter.

I am surprised on that chart above that you hear “on mute” on earnings calls, because those things are usually professionally-produced at some level.

To me, “on mute” is the second most tedious part of video calls, short of the six-minute period in the front end of every video call where we need to ask “Who just joined? Was that Rachel?” every 30 seconds, then update everyone who joined on the current small talk and who is currently in the video call. That never ceases to amaze me.

Takes on video calls?