Productivity

• Tips for Maximizing Your Work Commute [Glass Door]
• Best Twitter Feeds for Career Advice [MainStreet.com]
• Easy Ways to Improve Your Job Prospects [US News]
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Burnout has become a popular workplace buzzword, and some people (mostly employers) like to claim it doesn’t really exist.

But any of us who have been in the office trenches lately can tell a differently story. Most likely either we've dealt with burnout ourselves or have watched as others around us fell victim to it. As employees see their workload and stress level steadily increase, burnout is becoming as prevalent in some offices as the common cold.

At the office we’re surrounded by corporate policy that dictates everything about the corporate environment from the ways the bathrooms are decorated (or not decorated) and the color of the kitchen refrigerator to the number of plants in the lobby to even what you and your coworkers can wear. It’s overbearing and can make us feel almost inhuman.

Everything in life is relative, so it’s difficult to convince office professionals who suffer from depression that they have many things to be happy about—like having a job, for instance. Depression, of course, is an incredibly complicated beast, where our emotional, physical, intellectual, mental, ancestral and medical capacities all verge together in our head like a Mississippi delta of our personal human condition.

There are certain things you always knew about life, but never had the scientific evidence to back up your observations. You know that yawning is contagious. You know that eating ice cream too fast will give you brain freeze. You also know that the weekly department meeting at 2pm every Tuesday is a complete waste of your time. And now, finally, there is scientific proof as to why you’ve always known that conference room just seemed to suck the intelligence out of people.

If you’re like many office professionals, you spend your days working 9 to 5 in a cubicle. And, if you’re like many office professionals, you don’t necessarily think that’s the best working environment or situation. And many experts would agree with you.

We’re taught from an early age the importance of being able to work with other people. There is strength and power in numbers, and when groups of people work as a team there is little that can stop them.  Even the New York Yankees, with their seemingly boundless financial resources, can’t field a winning team if the individuals don’t work as a team. The same concept applies to your team at the office. However, this doesn’t mean your team always has be together all of the time. In fact, having some alone time at work can make employees even more productive.

If you’re looking for a new job, you probably have already learned that online job sites have replaced the old-fashioned classified ads. So it is a good idea to spend some time on the major job sites. However, experts—like the one who wrote this article—warn that you shouldn’t make the mistake of spending too much time on them.

Young people by nature are full of energy, passion and hope; and that is a good thing, because they’re going to need all of those qualities to survive this job market. Though it appears the economy may be improving, there is still a bottleneck of young talent trying to fill too few career-fulfilling jobs out there. And this is frustrating.