Work + Money

by Amanda MacMillan

Next time your boss catches you checking your bracket today (that is if it's not already 100 percent busted -- thanks, Florida Gulf Coast), respond with this little factoid: Focusing on the NCAA tournament during work hours may actually make you more productive in the long run. At least that's what some experts say!

See more: Top Secrets of the Beauty Pros

According to a recent survey by online staffing service OfficeTeam -- and a pretty adorable infographic by TurboTax -- 17 percent of employees spend more than an hour checking scores or watching basketball games during the workday. The good news is that 75 percent of office managers believe that the tourney has no impact on worker productivity -- while 16 and 21 percent, respectively, actually think that it can boost employee output and morale!

"Employees need a chance to bond with coworkers over shared interests," says an OfficeTeam executive quoted in the survey; therefore, chatting about your wins and

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Aries (March 21 - April 19) You feel like more of a pioneer than a follower today -- not that you're ever really one of the sheep. Don't waste time or money trying to fit in. You can make much more of a profit by being yourself than you could ever hope to by being derivative, pun intended. Today's Aries Reading: Free Sample Past Life Reading

Taurus (April 20 - May 20) You're not looking to find your fame and fortune today, so the bottom line won't be too much of a let down. You're just looking to break even -- or not stray too far into the red. You can raise the bar another day. Today's Taurus Reading: Free Sample Karmic Love Reading

Gemini (May 21 - June 21) You don't usually take things too seriously, but even you can't find the punch line to today's numbers. No one is laugh

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Even earning a six-figure income is apparently not enough to ease the fear, among a whole lot of women, of winding up destitute and alone. That’s according to the 2013 “Women, Money and Power and Study” by Allianz Life, released this week, which found that 49 percent of those surveyed had a deep-down fear of becoming a “bag lady,” with more than a quarter of those women making $200,000 or more a year.

“For women, money is often seen as a finite thing,” Eleanor Blayney, consumer advocate for the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, told Yahoo! Shine. Even though it’s no longer true that women must figure out how to survive on the money that men dole out to them, she said, there could be a bit of that residual anxiety in our cultural DNA. “Men are cultured a little bit differently around that,” she noted. “They have more of a sense of, well, when it runs out, you go out and make more.”

For the research, Allianz surveyed 2,200 nationally representative women aged 25 to 75 with

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How'd you get your last job? I'm guessing there is a high likelihood that you got the position through someone you know or through a friend-of-a-friend. And if you work for yourself or in a freelance field your livelihood is that much more influenced by who you know and who those people know.

People in charge tend to hire others based on recommendations of their friends and co-workers for many reasons. Namely: the person doing the hiring will usually trust the person that is doing the recommending (at least on some level) because the person doing the recommending probably has insights into what is needed for the job (especially if they work at the company). Also, the person doing the hiring might just want to do the person doing the recommending a favor, essentially saying, "Well, even if we don't hire this person I at least interviewed them so that means we gave him/her a shot". And looky there, the potential hire has their foot in the door and has a significantly higher chanc

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Blondes are notorious for having more fun but according to actress Olivia Wilde, true career satisfaction is achieved by ditching the peroxide.

During an interview on Thursday with the fashion and beauty website Into The Gloss, Wilde explains how switching up her hair hue from blonde to brunette was a professional game changer, saying:

"I spent the first couple years of my career as a very blonde blonde. And then I went brunette for a role, and suddenly all my offers changed—the types of roles people approached me with totally changed. When I was really blonde, it was always like, ‘The really pretty girl,’ or ‘The sexy hot chick.’….And then when I went brunette, the roles went to more, ‘She’s a waitress with a heart of gold, and a tough life,’ or ‘She’s a doctor.’ And I always wondered—would I have been offered those roles had I still been blonde? I don’t think so….I think the perception of brunettes being more intellectual persists...And when I went from being blonde for a long time t

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