Separating Your Professional and Personal Lives is Easier Than You Think

“Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management.”

 Betsy Jacobson

There are many reasons to keep your professional and personal lives separate and unfortunately, it’s easier than ever to blur the line between the two. Crossing the line is as simple as having a corporate mobile phone dinging when you go home or having personal social media accounts where you’re connected with some of your coworkers. So what’s the problem?

When you don’t define clear boundaries you open yourself to a host of issues like missing important personal moments, negatively impacting your well being and your work output, and allowing colleagues too much insight into your personal life. Situations like this can be avoided by setting and managing clear boundaries. Why is it important to set boundaries?

Protect Your Professional Image

Even in the modern day workplace it’s important to maintain your professional image. Drawing the line and being mindful of potential conflicts of interest is always the best practice, especially when it comes to social media accounts.

Leave Work At Work

When you bring work home, you’re not able to be truly present home and may miss out on some pretty important moments. In addition, separating work from home allows you to relax and prevent burnout which can influence your productivity.

The three most common areas where our professional and personal lives collide are social media, the phone, and email. It’s important to have separate accounts for each communication channel. Even though juggling multiple accounts can seem overwhelming, it’s almost always the best solution and it’s more simple than you think. Here are some ways to manage your accounts with ease:

Social Media

• Leave LinkedIn and Twitter for your professional life and Facebook for your personal life.
• If you need Facebook for work purposes, make sure it’s a page for your business and not a profile.
• If you must have duplicate accounts, tools like LastPass make it quick and easy for you to switch in between profiles without having to remember and type in login information.

Phone

• Nobody wants to carry around two phones, but you also don’t want to conduct personal business on a corporate phone. Luckily there’s a solution. Tools like Tresta, a cloud-based phone system, allow you to utilize a business phone number on your personal device. Meaning your business calls will come through to your personal device when you set them to.  And they’ll be clearly marked as professional calls. In addition, you can dial out via a mobile app that uses the business phone number from your cell phone.That way your personal number stays private and your professional and personal phone calls are kept separate, all on one device.
• Another way to avoid bringing work home is to have work-related calls sent elsewhere after hours. You don’t even have to send them to voicemail, answering services like PATLive take calls 24 hours/day with a live and friendly agent so that your callers are always well taken care of.

Email

• Never use your business email or computer for personal emails and vice versa.
• Do you have your work email account set up on your personal phone? Turn your push notifications off.  That way you’re not tempted to pick up your phone and flip through as new emails pop up.

We’re all guilty of allowing our professional and personal lives to cross paths on occasion.  But it’s simple to set up a system to keep them separate.

Follow the steps and you’ll be happier, healthier, and a better employee.

This guest post was authored by Jamie Lowary.

Jamie Lowary is the Channel Relations Manager for Tresta, a cloud-based telecommunications company. Tresta’s easy to use interface allows users to create a completely custom call flow configuration so you can work wherever the day takes you.