Your professional life will occupy approximately one out of every four hours of your life from the time you get your first job to the day you retire. With such a large commitment to work, it can be easy to let the lines between your professional life and your personal life blur until you're either bringing your personal affairs to the office or working through the weekend to catch up with your job. Neither of these is a healthy way to operate, and you're courting disaster if you let your professional life intrude on your private space or vice-versa. Here are a few tips on how to keep your worlds from colliding.
Keeping your personal life out of the office is one of those rules that seems easy to follow when you hear it, but it can be more difficult than you think. This is especially true when you've worked in one place for several years and have grown close to a number of your coworkers. The temptation to discuss personal matters—relationships, kids, or church—is natural. Try to keep private matters quarantined from your at-work conversations as much as possible. By adopting an "at-work" attitude when you step through the office door, you help your professional life by focusing only on the work that's waiting for you. Idle talk and distractions can thus be excluded to the advantage of your workflow.
At home, the situation is markedly different. Since the home is your private space, you should feel free to talk about any subject you like to anyone who's listening. Work, however, should be kept strictly off the schedule. While talking about work to your friends and family doesn't have any real drawbacks, taking time away from the important people in your life to actually do work can be destructive to even the happiest home. If you let your employer think you're still on the clock after you've gone home, it's a rare supervisor who won't be tempted to take advantage of your accessibility at least now and then. By making it clear to your employer that off the clock really means off the clock, you can draw a strict boundary that shows you respect your professional life too much to let it bleed out into other areas of your life.
The way you talk is the key to how others will look at you. If you bring up personal matters at work, for instance, those around you will probably do likewise assuming that you have a loose set of boundaries that they can cross at will. If you keep your words and your actions professional when you're among coworkers, however, you can send a subtle yet powerful signal that your privacy is important to you and that you would prefer to be left out of others' private drama as well.
It can be uncomfortable and difficult to draw adequate boundaries around your personal and professional life, but the results are well worth the effort. While your strictly business posture at work can put off some potential friends, others will come to understand that you take your professional life seriously and respect you all the more for it.
(Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)
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