You get to work an hour early every day, you answer e-mails as you choke down your lunch and you’re the last to leave the office every evening. When you get home, you catch up on work you didn’t get to during the day and plan your schedule for the following day. Sometimes you miss dinner with the family and you find yourself distracted when your wife’s talking to you, but besides that, you’re a model manager, right?
Not so fast. Studies show that once you pass the requisite eight hours of work, productivity drops by 10%. If you typically work much longer than eight hours and bypass ten hours, your productivity goes down by almost 30%. Surprised? What you think is making you better at your job could actually be making you worse.
Workplace burnout is not something to be taken lightly. How do you avoid this easy-to-fall-into hole while still keeping up with your required work? Follow these three strategies for avoiding manager burnout, excelling in your career and keeping the rest of your life relatively balanced.
1. Unplug and Detach from Technology
Smartphone are great, aren’t they? You can check your e-mail, chat with co-workers, upload photos to your social media profiles and manage your Hoot Suite accounts all before you get out of bed in the morning. What you don’t realize is that all of these tools that can help with productivity actually make you less productive if you overuse them. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and every other way you can connect with the world are not meant to be on and used around-the-clock. Just because you can be online and working doesn’t mean you should be.
Unplugging from technology is absolutely necessary in order to avoid burnout. Set a time each night to turn the laptop off, resign from checking your e-mail until the morning and put your phone in another room. An extra perk is that you’ll sleep better when you’re not stimulated from recent online interaction.
2. Take Advantage of Your Time Off
Your personal time, sick time and vacation days are there for a reason – for you to use them. While you shouldn’t abuse your time off, you shouldn’t avoid using it, either. Getting out of the office and away from work will recharge and refresh you. You’ll be surprised at how much more efficient you are when you’re back in the office after a much-needed week or even long weekend off.
3. Pick Up a Hobby
Your hobby should be something that’s not related to your career, even if you truly love your profession. For example, if you’re a writer, your hobby shouldn’t be something that has to do with words, like reading poetry. Find something far removed from your day job so that when you get involved with it, you stop thinking about your career. If you have to, schedule time each week to dive into your hobby and get your mind off work.
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Rhonda Cooper is a business manager and guest author. You can read her most recent article on bachelor of business administration degrees online.