KACHARAGADLA

To be your most productive self, take a step back from your work. Between working,  exercising  and spending time with family, you may think you’re giving yourself enough  breaks , but what about during work? Taking breaks throughout your work day is vital to maximizing  productivity . Think you don’t have time? Even a 30-second break can account for an increase in productivity. There are different strategies for a work-break balance too, and it’s important to find the one that is best for you. For example, try out a 25/5-minute split -- that means work in 25-minute blocks and take five-minute breaks between. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s also 50/10 minute split. What you do during your breaks is just as important. If you only have five minutes, eat a healthy snack, read an article or even try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. When you have 10 minutes, make a coffee run, tidy up your desk or watch a TED talk. If you’ve got more than 10 minutes -- take a walk outside, call a

You are a well-brought-up person with perfect manners, or at least you aspire to be. You probably know that the rudest thing you can do is to call out, mention or acknowledge another person's bad behavior! When someone is rude to you, the best thing to do is to smile and ignore the impolite behavior. As a well-brought-up person, that's what you will do when you run into rudeness on the job search trail. Sadly, I can almost guarantee that you will run into rude interviewers asking terribly impolite and intrusive questions. Here are five of the most insulting questions an interviewer can ask  you. All five of them are very common. Interviewers are  badly trained. Somewhere along the line, somebody taught them that in the business world, it's okay to ask people questions you would never dream of asking someone you were meeting for the first time in any other setting. We would never presume to ask someone at the gym, the grocery store, a block party or a place of

“Genius clubs” to channel older workers’ talents. Mandatory retirement — at 80. A “dynamic” work/life path, instead of today’s linear path. The end of the expectation of rising pay as you age. Volunteering: the new status symbol. Unions for older workers. These are some of the fascinating forecasts I’ve just heard regarding the future of work for Americans over 50. These predictions I just received from experts, which I’ll elaborate on shortly, are part of Next Avenue’s month-long series on the future for Americans over 50 to celebrate our site’s fifth anniversary. Our previous pieces: “ The Future of Health for Americans Over 50 ,” “ Personal Finance Forecasts for Americans Over 50, ”  “ How People 50+ Will Live in the Near and Distant Future ” and “ What the Future of Adult Learning Will Look Like .” Coming up: The Future of Caregiving for People 50+. To help set the scene, let me share what  Roy Bahat , head of Bloomberg Beta and co-chair of  The Shift Commission on Work, Wo

Most of us are familiar with the research that details how employees lack a sense of engagement in the workplace.  Gallup surveys consistently show  that only about one-third of all employees feel engaged in their work. Among the factors contributing to engagement, according to Gallup, are being able to do what you do best, having a voice in the workplace, and having someone at work who encourages your development. Without such engagement, productivity-- and ultimately business performance --suffer. In a recent article , I suggested that disengagement in the workplace is not just a function of poor management practices, but also the absence of positive emotional experience connected to our work. Burnout occurs when four key components of well-being are absent from our daily experience: Joy - The experience of happiness and pleasure; Satisfaction - The experience of doing meaningful things; Energy - The experience of excitement and optimism; Relationships - The experience

A group of coworkers gather together in a conference room. Four are performing in front of the group, acting out a party scene; one pretends to be a dog at the vet, another Mark Twain, and a third is a birthday clown while a fourth guesses who they are. The rest of the group watches and laughs as these four explore what happens when the host spills dip on Mark Twain’s suit, or what a clown’s work life crisis might look like. Believe it or not, this is what effective team building looks like. Recent  studies  show that employees who believe that their workplaces are innovative and fun not only work harder but maintain greater loyalty towards their organizations for longer periods of time. Environments friendly to laughter are creating hotbeds of success. Some companies are enjoying a significant increase in productivity from a single instance of levity, according to Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher, authors of  The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up . Studies show