Tips for Zoom that make everyone's experience better

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A lot of work happens on Zoom and Slack in companies these days. Working in distributed teams seems almost impossible without tools like these.

Here are some of my personal tips for Zoom that make everyone's experience a little better:

1. Use headphones but set zoom to use the headphones as the speaker and your machine's microphone instead. This will effectively boost your audio experience from 11k (phone call) to 44k ('CD') while also avoiding issues with echo prevention (if you use no headphones, zoom doesn't play anyone's voice out of your speakers while you're talking - which creates those 'wait, what did you say?' moments)
2. Set keyboard shortcuts to 'enable global' for things like mute, video, and screen sharing so you never have to switch windows to speak up or hide a sneeze.
3. Set your screen sharing to share your full desktop by default (combined with 2, this means you can have a moment like "Oh, I think I know where that thing is, let me just go into Notion... Yeah, I see it - lemme show you" CMD+SHIFT+S and boom, they see what you see without a bunch of clicking.
4. Obvious ones: Join audio automatically, mute audio and video when joining, prevent fullscreen when someone shares.

Note re: (1), using newer headphones will get you 22khz duplex over bluetooth; and wired headphones suffer other problem with mics (collars, zippers, and general cord noise). Vishal Pallerla on our team uses an external webcam microphone - that works better for him because he uses monitors and likes to close his laptop all the time.

Everton Moreth and Debo Ray on the team have also adopted these practices and experience a noticeable improvement in team interactions. Give it a shot and if it works for you, share this blog!

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