Ways to Avoid Burnout

As we begin our corporate adventures of the new year, it’s important to remember the importance of encouraging continued motivation and inspiration for our work. Importance for this idea lies in avoiding mid-year burn-out. I realize this may sound like a far-fetched idea considering many of you are most likely still holding on to the feeling of rejuvenation after returning to work from the holiday’s. Yet, in order to avoid the terrible feelings that come with burning out, we must start planning ways to set up for our continued feelings of encouragement and rejuvenation all year long.

With this, here are 4 ways to go about avoiding mid-year burnout:

1. Create an inspiration/vision board

• This may sound like a silly project one would do with their young children, but the dreaming a goal-visioning it naturally sets up for actually has extremely positive effects on people of all ages. Moreover, if you’re not into crafty projects, creating an inspiration board doesn’t have to be a slew of cutting and pasting pictures from various magazine and newspapers onto poster board. Inspiration boards can be made with paint, sketched, simply written as a list, or even created digitally.

2. Change up your work-space

• Working in the same physical environment year after year can have a surprisingly negative impact on one’s efficiency and effectiveness for their work. Therefore, in order to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, your employees, or your co-workers, try changing up your work-spaces periodically. In doing this, most people say they feel refreshed in their place of work which contributes to an overall feeling of rejuvenation. Therefore, the more often you change up your work-space, the better you’ll most likely feel!  

3. Get organized

• Getting organized helps one to feel better at their place of work in almost every single way. Not only does it save you time by not having to shuffle through dozens of papers, documents, files, and so on in order to find the one piece of paper you’re looking for, but it ultimately contributes to the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your work. Getting organized allows us to think with a clear head, and eliminates the constant stress of not having what we need to complete any given day’s work. Therefore, instead of spending weeks, if not months, agonizing over a messy work-space that you’ll eventually decide to spend almost an entire day cleaning out, commit to getting organized now and keep up with it on a daily basis. Not only will the up-keep only take you between 2-5 minutes a day, but you won’t ever have to stress over spending hours getting organized again! 

4. Take time for yourself consistently

• In a time of constant work and endless tasks, people have largely started viewing time for themselves as unproductive and selfish. We have grown to view the limited number of weeks we’re given vacation from work, as the only time for ourselves. We work ourselves thin, finally reach our destination of a few weeks of vacation, celebrate wildly, and ultimately head back to work only to fall right back into a pit of tiredness and irritability all over again. In order to avoid this cycle, it’s important to take time for ourselves on a consistent basis. And by consistent, that means roughly once a week at minimum. Allowing this time for ourselves will give us the ability for consistent energy levels and positive feelings throughout the year.