We've all been there – sprint, sprint, sprint.... and... you burn out. You've worked yourself to the bone, whether it be for a month, a year, or 10 years – don't let yourself fall into this trap. It's all too easy in this day and age of remote work that we all live in to wake up, go right to your screens (Slack included) and start scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through work messages. It's not sustainable, and you should be aware of not only the signs of burnout for you, but for your team too. More importantly, once you recognize that burnout is happening, what are you going to do to combat it? Well, that's the reason for this article! Did you know, there are actually a ton of apps and tools that you can download for Slack today to get you and your team heading away from the slippery slope that is burnout. Let's dig in below to see what some of these top apps are and what they do.

1. CultureBot

CultureBot is a top choice on our review of Slack apps to address burnout, as it is the most comprehensive solution to all of the ones listed below. It helps with:

• Employee engagement
• Employee appreciation
• Wellness and physical fitness
• Overall well-being
• Employee boredom

It's pretty much a super-app for all things team building, appreciation, and culture. With that being said, what do some of these features look like?

To address employee engagement issues: conversation starters

To address employee appreciation: shoutouts & kudos

To address overall well-being: mental & physical health tips

To address employee boredom issues: real-time trivia

To get started with CultureBot, just click the "add to slack" button below – it's that easy.

2. GameMonk

GameMonk is a beautiful little app that allows you to play a few quick games inside Slack in 90 seconds or less to get your mind off of work before a meeting, after a meeting, or during your afternoon coffee or lunch break. Some of the games you can play include:

• Categories: Given a category, name as many as you can in 60 seconds. Try saying hint during a game for a hint. First one to say each unique term in the category gets a point.
• Giphy: Given a GIF, guess what hashtag is related. Say more to see more images, or tell me if you give up.Trivia: GameMonk will ask a multiple choice trivia question, answer A, B, C or D first and get the point!

3. Gratitudely

Academic studies have proven that gratitude journals, lists, diaries, logs - whatever you wanna call it - have benefits to our well-being:

• Increased happiness and life satisfaction.
• More self-esteem, motivation, and resilience.
• Reduced stress and anxiety.

Install the Gratitudely Slack bot to address these exact points above. How does it work exactly?

1. Gratitudely sends you a prompt (e.g. "What do you like most about your city?")
2. You answer the prompt in Slack
3. Save the prompt and optionally share it with your team (and, thus, urging them to fill out and share their gratitude as well).

You can choose the date and time to send the gratitude prompts, and even set them up to be recurring.

4. BanterBot

Use BanterBot to start conversations inside Slack to address the "boredom" part of your team's burnout. BanterBot comes chock-full of topics to choose from, but also let's you create a bunch of your own (if you're feeling up to it). The goal is to ultimately build more camaraderie amongst your employees and teammates.  

5. GuineaPig

GuineaPig is an app that helps you focus and reduce stress in your workday. With the app, you can access a collection of guided meditations and mindfulness exercises designed to help you and your teammates stay calm and focused. GuineaPig is similar to popular wellness and mindfulness apps on iOS or Android, but it's specifically designed for use within Slack. This means you can easily access the app from your workspace and integrate it into your daily routine.

With it, you can:

• Create wellness reminders to send to yourself in Slack at a certain time of each day
• Get wellness tips between meetings
• Get guided tips on how to start the workday to relieve stress  

6. Lunch (bot)

Lunch bot for Slack makes it easy to quickly organize delivery of lunch food to your office. Taking a solid lunch break each day is a great way to reduce the risk of burnout, especially when it's taken with peers – giving you a social outlet and chance to take your mind off work and make meaningful conversation and connects with others. The importance of this is huge – if you're not taking a lunch break today, start!

So, how does this thing actually work?

A trivial thing like ordering lunch in the office takes WAY TOO MUCH time. Picking the restaurant, gathering orders from the team, ordering, making sure everyone pays what they owe…The Lunch bot will make all those time-consuming pains go away. It will manage ordering food, how much people pay and how much they owe, and answer the question: “So, who’s placing the order today?.” Want to order pizza for lunch? Start an order with a simple command and invite people to join.

7. Kasem

Breaking the ice and having fun in remote settings (and, thus, avoiding our little friend called "bunrout") can be particularly challenging without intentionality. Kasem brings the fun to everyday meetings by allowing people to submit songs they like, return a song to the channel, discuss as a team, and vote on who they think submitted the song. Use the last five minutes of your meetings to get to know your team. There are just two Slack slash commands to know to get the most out of Kasem:

• /kasem-addSong (allows you to add a song to the song bank)
• /kasem-getSong (returns back a song from the song bank)

Wrapping what we've learned up, there are plenty of quick and easy to install Slack apps that you can install today to address burnout, both individually and across your team. I highly recommend trying one of the tools above - there's very little risk and time you need to take to get started. If you find a tool on the Slack app store that you feel addresses burnout, we'd love to hear about it.

~ Amy