Top 10 tips to fight virtual meeting fatigue with Nextcloud Talk’s 2025 updates

If you often think, “This meeting could have been an email”, you might be combating meeting fatigue.

With remote working on new productivity tools, it’s easier than ever to jump on a quick call. However, keeping these meetings focused and useful is becoming a real challenge.

Inefficient meetings are quoted as the top workplace distraction that hurts productivity, followed by having too many meetings. But you can’t avoid them completely: one way or another, your team does need to meet up to brainstorm new ideas and share the latest updates.

So what’s the solution?

At Nextcloud, we have a range of features ready for you in Nextcloud Talk to ensure better-organized meetings. Discover 10 tips on how to get more done in less time to battle meeting fatigue and make the most of your online time together.

Before the meeting: Setting up a healthy meeting culture

Planning is half of the work, so take some time to reflect on why you are setting the meetings, what you want to discuss, and who you are inviting.

1. Use team messaging features to reduce meetings

Before you start a meeting, use your other online collaboration tools to their full extent. Nextcloud Mail is perfect for sharing information, while Nextcloud Talk lets you quickly ping a person, asking for a written update in their own time.

Thanks to Nextcloud Talk’s many hidden gems, you can easily replace a meeting with a message. Use threads to keep conversations organized, brainstorm new ideas with polls, and share files for real-time online collaboration.

2. Ahead of your meeting, prepare smart

If you have decided that you should meet online, take some time to set up your meeting, thinking about the purpose of the meeting, what documents to add, and who to invite.

With Nextcloud, you get plenty of options to prepare and personalize your meetings thanks to its deeply integrated setup.

Open a meeting in Nextcloud Calendar, include attachments from Nextcloud Files, configure a Nextcloud Talk conversation, and find participants in your contacts.

Within a couple of clicks, you’ll get a Nextcloud Talk meeting set up with a briefing and calendar invite, for full transparency and clarity.

To help you keep your space clean from one-time conversations, “Meeting conversations”, created for a single appointment, are kept separate from other conversations. Nextcloud Talk lets you decide whether you want to keep, archive, or delete the room once the meeting is over. The room also stays hidden before the event to avoid clutter and confusion.

Want to prep the meeting before getting started?

With the silent call option in Nextcloud Talk, you can join a meeting room without notifying everyone: Perfect for setting up, testing, or preparing before the call begins.

3. Keep the right timing

When it comes to planning, it’s important to keep in mind that meetings of 25 or 50 minutes (instead of 30 or 60 minutes) can reduce burnout.

As an administrator, you can easily put a hard limit on the call length in Nextcloud Talk. What’s more, you can even set other participants to start with disabled video and/or audio input.

This is a useful feature for meetings with many participants where you want to ensure focus on the main message and limit talking time for others.

The sidebar also displays meeting duration and speaking time per participant, encouraging balanced discussions and a healthy meeting culture.

4. Start small: maybe it can just be a 1:1?

Ensuring that the meeting is relevant to all participants in the call is an important factor in battling meeting fatigue.

If possible, start with a one-on-one catch-up with your team member.

Do you need information from other participants in the end? With Nextcloud Talk, you can easily add participants to these calls while you are in the meeting.

During the meeting: Keeping it organized

Once you are in, it’s important to let everything run as smoothly as possible. Thanks to the automated status feature, polling options, easy screen shares, AI subtitles, and intuitive call control button, Nextcloud Talk keeps your meetings focused and on track.

5. Switch status to reduce distraction

Does getting pinged while you are in meetings make you anxious or annoyed?

Multitasking can be hard. Kindly let your team members know that you are in a meeting by changing your online status to “Busy”.

With Nextcloud Talk, your status automatically updates to “Busy” during active or scheduled meetings, keeping interruptions to a minimum.

6. Avoid chaos with interactive features

Asking questions during a meeting can cause chaos, risking derailing your meeting. So how can you get your team’s input in a more orderly way? Use polling options to get quick feedback, readily available in Nextcloud Talk.

You also have the “Raise hand” function for participants who would like to ask a question without causing interruption.

7. Use reactions for quick interaction

Use reactions in the online meeting platform, so participants can interact with a simple emoji: 👏 or 🤩 or
👎 or many others, without taking over the meeting.

8. Make it easier to follow

Make full use of your setup by sharing your screen during the meeting. Work on Nextcloud Files, brainstorm live in Nextcloud Whiteboard, or update your Nextcloud Deck cards while sharing your screen.

With the Zoom function, all participants can follow along with ease. The pan feature makes it possible to move a selected area from one side to another or up and down. Perfect for going around a Whiteboard gradually, highlighting ideas and showcasing before and after.

9. Ensure clarity with live transcriptions

Working online with different languages can cause confusion. Nextcloud Talk now features live AI subtitles in your calls, so every participant can understand and interact more easily than ever. And of course, the live AI subtitles feature is particularly handy if you need to work in silence. Use the transcription tool to follow what your colleagues are saying while staying muted.

After the meeting: Getting to work with clear follow-ups

Once the meeting is over, the real work can start. Set up a to-do list, send out requests, and follow up with other members. Clear follow-ups are essential to fight meeting fatigue.

10. Send the meeting summary to everyone

Do you also find taking manual notes can be time-consuming and distracting (“I’m sorry I didn’t catch that.”)? With Nextcloud Talk, you can stay 100% focused during the call, and let our Nextcloud Assistant AI tool automatically summarize the recorded call based on the transcripts. Or send the call summary to participants who couldn’t attend the meeting so they can catch up with ease. All are completely automated with Nextcloud Assistant.

Discover how Nextcloud Hub makes online collaboration easier and smarter

Meeting fatigue doesn’t have to dominate your team. With careful planning and a smart and intuitive conferencing platform, such as Nextcloud Talk, you can make your meetings run smoother than ever.

Curious to learn more?

Read more in the Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn series:

• Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn: Your digital workspace, ready in no time
• Reclaim your schedule and your privacy with Nextcloud Calendar. Discover the 2025 updates!
• How to automate tasks with open source AI agent tools in Nextcloud Assistant

Check out how Nextcloud Talk and other apps in Nextcloud Hub set you up with resilient collaboration and communication, including full data control and freedom from vendor lock-in.