Five Ways to Avoid Work Burnout This Fall

Oct. 7, 2010— -- Ah, autumn. Season of back-to-school sales, home winterizing projects and rapidly fading tans. With summer's barbecues, camping trips and seaside weekends quickly disappearing from the rear view mirror, it's time to throw yourself back into office life -- or the job hunt -- full throttle.

But what if you couldn't afford a summer vacation and your work -- or your quest for it -- has you so burned out you're not sure how you'll make it to Halloween, let alone to next Labor Day? How do you soldier on without telling off your colleagues or recruiters, pulling an emergency chute and sliding off into the unemployed sunset like former Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater?

I asked a number of seasoned professionals who've been to the fried side and back how they managed to slog through all that on-the-job boredom, frustration and misery (besides blasting through all their sick days). Their top burnout busters follow.

Earlier this year, "Marisol," an ex-employee at a furniture dealership in Nashville, Tenn., found herself "torn between being thankful for still having a job" and needing to set some boundaries with her boss on when quitting time was. (Understandably, Marisol didn't want her real name used.)

"My co-workers and I used to work late every day, and no matter how hard we worked it was never enough," said Marisol, who has since found a new job with a more predictable schedule. "So we started setting an alarm to go off at 4 p.m. every day to remind ourselves that we should start wrapping things up so we could literally be walking out the door at 5 p.m. It worked some days, and didn't others, but it usually made us laugh and feel better."

For Barbara Roche, an organizational development consultant in Boston, playing games with colleagues has helped add some much-needed levity to "potentially high burnout" periods at work. At a previous job, Roche and her co-workers would often play buzzword bingo throughout the workweek. "We made actual bingo cards and had a cash prize," Roche said. "It worked wonders."

Another on-the-job favorite of Roche and her former co-workers: guessing how many times the company's managing partner would walk down the hall on any given day. "The best part of this game was the hilarious e-mails that were shared when someone wanted to confirm a sighting," said Roche, who's a firm believer that bonding with one's colleagues can help reduce workplace weariness. "I worked with some very smart, funny people, and that was the more effective burnout preventer than the actual winning."

If you don't already do it yourself, chances are you know someone who breaks up each office afternoon with a 3 p.m. walk to the nearest purveyor of triple-shot espressos. (As one editor pal put it, "It's really the walk more than the caffeine that wakes me back up and hits my mental reset button.") But strolling down the block or doing laps around the company's grounds aren't your only options for a midafternoon pick me up.

"Instead of going downstairs and getting a coffee or smoking a cigarette on my breaks, I go into a spare office and do yoga for 10 minutes," said Karin Nembach, who works at a law firm that handles foreclosures in Boca Raton, Fla. And Bridget Quigg, a Seattle-based web editor, bounces back after lunch by taking what she calls "little lie-downs" for five to 15 minutes.

"I find a quiet place to go horizontal," said Quigg, who's been known to take advantage of a roomy closet at the office that she and her co-workers sometimes use for quick naps, private phone calls and breast-feeding. "It totally recharges my battery."