Stop With the Video Chats Already. Just Make a Voice Call.

Dear colleague and/or friend:

I’d love to do a call about this. And by “call” I mean absolutely NOT a video call. Let’s do a call-call. You know, those old things where we just hear each other’s beautiful voices. Whatever you do, don’t touch that webcam.

Looking forward to (audio) chatting,

Joanna

The time has come to be bold: Stop the nonstop video calling.

Allow me to remind you of the BPE (you know, the Before-Pandemic Era), a time long ago when every call didn’t require colour-coding your bookshelf background, firing up the webcam and staring into a human tic-tac-toe board for hours on end. Video calls used to be a rare treat. Now, they’re everyday soul suckers.

Really. There’s vampirical—I mean, empirical—proof. A high frequency of video calling can cause general, social, emotional, visual and motivational fatigue, researchers at the University of Gothenburg and Stanford University found in a recent study. Even Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, says he suffers from the dreaded “Zoom Fatigue.”

Look, I’m not saying all video calling must stop. I love video calling. Instantly see and hear people with little to no delay? It’s miraculous. My mom, who is hearing-impaired, struggled throughout my childhood to hear me on the phone. Now, she can see my son wherever she is, and the visual cues help her tremendously.

I’m just saying audio calls can be more productive—and they can sound better than ever.

But how do you know when to pick voice over video? And how do you make it happen without being the meeting jerk who just refuses to turn on the camera? After talking to researchers and technologists—and cutting back on my own video calls—I present you with five steps to regain your sanity.

Step 1: Ask, should this meeting just be an email?

Fact: There are too many meetings. So I beg of you, before deciding on the technological format, simply ask: Do we really need to meet at all?

Step 2: Understand the benefits of audio vs. video

Géraldine Fauville, an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the lead researcher on that aforementioned study, mapped out the main reasons video can be so cognitively draining:

• It’s a lot of looking at ourselves, which is unnatural and comes with self-evaluation and scrutiny. Called the mirror effect, this can be particularly intense for women. You can combat this with the self-hide option available in Zoom and Google Meet. Google has just added a number of features to address this specifically. Microsoft Teams’ new Together Mode was built to combat this, too.

• It’s a lot of close-up eye contact. In fact, the brain processes that sort of invasion of space as if it should lead to mating or fighting.

• It’s a lot of sitting and feeling trapped. You can’t get up and walk around during a video call.

• It’s a lot of nodding. “For you to communicate cues to the participant, you need to intensify the cues,” Dr. Fauville said. “So people nod more vigorously than if they were in the same room.”

No wonder we’re exhausted. So yes, limiting the number and length of video calls seems like the obvious answer. And as some of us kick-start the hybrid work life, that will happen naturally.

But voice calls aren’t just table scraps from our work-from-home buffet. They allow you to focus on what’s being said and give you real respite from the screen. I now do my weekly call with my boss on the phone. We reserve video for deeper conversations, like performance reviews.

I also still like to do video calls with colleagues I haven’t caught up with for a while, or for important meetings where reading facial expressions is crucial.

Step 3: Be clear it’s an audio call

You’ve decided that voice is the way to go for a call, now you’ve got to convey that to others.

Don’t waste precious meeting time having an awkward convo about this; be straight up before the call. “Hey, I’d like to do voice—no video—for this call. Work for you?” You can even put it on me: “I read this wonderful column in The Wall Street Journal about how too many video calls are bad.”

In a survey of employees, the University of California, Berkeley, found that 77% multitask during video calls. I called that out in a recent calendar invite: “Let’s do voice-only for this one,” I wrote to my colleagues. “We’re all going to cover each other’s faces with other windows on the screen anyway!” (Yep, we can see all of you, looking over at your second monitor!)

Step 4: Make the call

Even though I made my voice-call preferences known to my colleagues, I’m not just reaching for my phone. In fact, I’ve used all the big videoconferencing services—sans video. Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger all produce stable and clear calls if you have a good connection. Most sound better than cellular—especially if you have a good mic. But the best choice is however you can most easily reach your contact.

Slack has become my go-to for work. Since most of the folks already are there all day, it’s great for mimicking the quick desk drop-by. Hit the phone button and it automatically defaults to a voice call. (To add video, you have to tap the video icon.) With Slack audio use surging in the past year, the company has been piloting new group-audio features, an office variation of Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces.

Slack is also looking at ways to improve audio quality and make it easier to switch between desktop and mobile calls, Ali Rayl, the company’s vice president of product and customer experience, told me.

Call-quality-wise, FaceTime audio consistently sounds the best to me. I often talk to my editor via Apple’s service and he sounds crystal clear. The downside? Apple devices only.

Step 5: Try no-video days

“The responsibility of limiting Zoom fatigue is not just on the individuals,” Dr. Fauville told me. “We hope our findings inspire companies to rethink videoconferencing.”

So far, so good. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has started “Zoom-free Fridays,” a day free of internal video calls. The University of California, Berkeley, for the past year, has said no recurring meetings—of any kind—on Friday afternoons.

You may want to try a similar policy. Or at the very least start perfecting those extremely polite “You don’t want to see my face and I don’t want to see your face” emails.

Even in Hollywood, pre-eminent in the field of chutzpah, greatness can be intimidating. Rarely does one hear producers discuss their plans to remake “Casablanca” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” It took Disney many years of creating live-action remakes of its classic animated features before it worked up the nerve to take another whack at its first, and perhaps most venerated, work, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which in 1937 set the template for richly evocative animation that could appeal to all ages. It is still, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the 10th-highest-grossing movie ever released in North America.

Disney’s first “Snow White” isn’t perfect—the prince is badly underwritten and doesn’t even get a name—but it is, by turns, enchanting, scary and moving. Version 2.0, starring Rachel Zegler in the title role and Gal Gadot as her nefarious stepmother, has been in the works since 2016 and already feels like it’s from a bygone era. After fans seemed grumpy about the rumored storyline and the casting of Ms. Zegler, Disney became bashful about releasing it last March and ordered reshoots to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, the story is so dopey it made me sleepy.

Directed by Marc Webb (“The Amazing Spider-Man” with Andrew Garfield ), the remake is neither a clever reimagining (like “The Jungle Book” and “Pete’s Dragon,” both from 2016) nor a faithful retelling (like 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast”), but rather an ungainly attempt at modernization. The songs “I’m Wishing” and “Someday My Prince Will Come” have been cut; the big what-she-wants number near the outset is called “Waiting on a Wish.” Instead of longing for true love (=fairy tale), Snow White hopes to sharpen her leadership skills (=M.B.A. program). And she keeps talking about a more equitable distribution of wealth in the kingdom she is destined to rule after her mother, the queen, dies and her father, having made a questionable choice for his second spouse, goes missing.

Ms. Gadot, giving it her all, is serviceable as the wicked stepmother. But she doesn’t bring a lot of wit to the role, and the script, by Erin Cressida Wilson , does very little to help. Her hello-I’m-evil number, “All Is Fair,” is meant to be the film’s comic showstopper but it’s barely a showslower, a wan imitation of “Gaston” from “Beauty and the Beast” or “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from “The Little Mermaid.” The original songs, from the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land”), also stack up poorly against the three tunes carried over from the original “Snow White,” each of which has been changed from a sweet bonbon into high-energy, low-impact cruise-ship entertainment. So unimaginative is the staging of the numbers that it suggests such straight-to-Disney+ features as 2019’s “Lady and the Tramp.”

After escaping a plot to kill her, Snow White becomes friends with a digital panoply of woodland animals and with the Seven Dwarfs, who instead of being played by actors are also digital creations. The warmth of the original animation is totally absent here; the tiny miners look like slightly creepy garden gnomes, except for Dopey, who looks like Alfred E. Neuman . As for the prince, there isn’t one; the love interest, Jonathan (a forgettable Andrew Burnap ), is a direct lift of the rogue-thief Flynn Rider , from 2010’s “Tangled,” plus some Robin Hood stylings. His sour, sarcastic tribute to the heroine, “Princess Problems,” is the worst Snow White number since the one with Rob Lowe at the 1989 Oscars.

Ms. Zegler isn’t the chief problem with the movie, but as in her debut role, Maria in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” she has a tendency to seem bland and blank, leaving the emotional depths of her character unexplored even as she nearly dies twice. Gloss prevails over heart in nearly every scene, and plot beats feel contrived. She and Jonathan seem to have no interest in one another until, suddenly, they do; and when he and his band of thieves escape from a dungeon, they do so simply by yanking their iron chains out of the walls. Everything comes too easily and nothing generates much feeling. When interrogated by the evil queen, who wants to know what happened to her stepdaughter, Jonathan replies, “Snow who?” Which would be an understandable reaction to the movie. “Snow White” is the fairest of them all, in the sense that fair can mean mediocre.