Use Work Breaks To Keep Up Connections

We all know that taking breaks from work is beneficial to productivity, but that doesn’t mean that your breaks themselves can’t be productive. Career weblog WorkAwesome suggests a few tips for keeping breaks productive without focusing on work.

Photo by George Reyes.

We all love to waste time on Facebook and personal emails during our breaks, and while we’re all for keeping up with your friends, it’s rarely something you’d consider productive. In their list of things to keep breaks productive, WorkAwesome mentions that that your networking time could be better spent: Instead of personal networking — which you’ll most likely do after work anyways — focus on networking that can actually benefit your career:

Get a LinkedIn account and start connecting to people here. Find professional contacts out of the office too. This is a legitimate business function. Think of it as your address book on steroids.

And use it to reach out to your connections. Let them know what you’re doing. This is groundwork for when you start looking for a promotion or new job.

In the meantime, any manager here will see that you are serious about developing your career and meeting more people.

You don’t necessarily have to get a LinkedIn account to do professional networking (we don’t want to come off like a LinkedIn commercial here), but professional networking is something a lot of us neglect — sometimes, networking for work just seems like more work. But it can also be one of the most helpful things in advancing your career, especially if you’re at a less-than-permanent job. Plus, networking can seem a lot less like work when it’s done in between actual work during the day.

How to Take Productive Breaks [WorkAwesome]