Video conferencing from Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and the like is a great tool that has enabled many of us to keep in touch with our teams over the last 12 months while we've been working remotely.
And that same useful tool has also been a bit of a curse, leading to what's been termed Zoom burnout – where exhaustion sets in because back-to-back meetings with groups of participants is mentally a lot more taxing than it would be if everyone was in the same room. Add to that the fact that even finding a time slot when everyone is available can be a challenge (especially if your team is split across timezones) and it's not surprising that video calls have gone from being a remote working saver to a remote working pain.
Now Google hopes to help solve that problem with a new service called Threadit, which lets you record and reply to video messages when it's convenient to you. Don't you feel less stressed already just thinking about that possibility?
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The project comes from Google's incubator team which is called Area 120. On Google's blog, the team explains that "Threadit hopes to capitalize on the video medium, but without the 'live' nature that’s limiting to people working in different time zones."
Threadit works by recording either your front-facing camera or your computer screen. You can record short clips, which can be re-recorded if you're not happy with them, and get them automatically stitched together.
Once you've recorded your clip, you can share it with your team via a threadit.app link and they can reply with their own video message when it's convenient to them. It's a neat idea that could save people having to choose between writing long email threads (which no one has time to read) or trying to get everyone together at the same time for a video chat (which leads to the inevitable out-of-hours calls).
"Using the tool became a great way to see one another without having to schedule live meetings across time zones. I’d send a Threadit to my colleagues in Japan during my normal working hours in Seattle; they’d respond during the hours that worked for them in Tokyo. Threadit helped us feel like we were working together in person, even though we were responding at different times from across the world," the Threadit team says.
How you use Threadit is entirely up to you. You could use it for a daily asynchronous meeting, for team training, project demos and more. The Area 120 team explains that they use Threadit to sharing sales presentations to recording product tutorials to sending leadership updates. They even started using Threadit as a way of celebrating team birthdays.
Threadit is available to use right now – from your browser or as a Chrome extension, so why not give it a try?
Via 9to5google.
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