How to keep your personal life private at work

Keeping your personal life private will help you build a professional image while allowing you to develop and maintain good relationships with colleagues in the company. Allowing your personal life to strongly influence your behavior will damage how people perceive you at work. By setting some reasonable boundaries, exercising self-control, and separating your work life from your personal life, you’ll be able to maintain privacy in your private life without being seen as a person. prefer to live alone in the office.

Table of Contents

Set boundaries between work and life

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Decide on topics that you shouldn’t share. If you’re trying to keep your personal life private at work, the first thing you need to do is define specific boundaries. This is different for everyone and depends on the unique culture of your company and the work-life balance you are looking for. ^{[1] X Research Source} Regardless of any workplace rules, you can still set your own boundaries. Start by making a list of all the factors that you don’t want to discuss with your co-workers.

It can include topics such as love life, illness, religious and political views. ^{[2] X Research Source}
You should think about things that you don’t feel comfortable with or don’t want to discuss with your co-workers.
Don’t make your list public, keep it in mind so you can excuse yourself from the conversation you want to avoid.

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Know every question the interviewer can’t ask you. By law, there are quite a few questions an employer cannot ask you. They are questions related to family background and life that can lead to racism. For example, employers are not allowed to ask about your age, or whether you have a disability, or about your marital status. If someone raises this question to you at work, you have the right not to answer. Some other questions that you don’t necessarily need to answer include:

Are you a US citizen or not?
Do you use drugs, smoke or drink alcohol?
What is your religion?
Are you pregnant?
What is your race? ^{[3] X Research Sources}

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Cut down on all personal calls in the office. If you are trying to separate your work life from your personal life, you need to avoid bringing your personal life to the company. That means you need to minimize any personal phone calls and emails while you’re at work. From time to time, you can call to make an appointment with your barber or dentist, but if people regularly overhear you on the phone to talk privately, your co-workers can not only eavesdrop on you, but also question you. about the conversation. ^{[4] X Research Sources}

Too many personal phone calls will also upset your boss and co-workers will think that you are not working hard.
If you don’t want to receive work-related calls while at home, you shouldn’t get into the habit of making personal calls while at work.

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Do not bring family affairs to the company. Easier said than done, but you should try not to bring personal matters to the company and maintain absolute professionalism in your work. You’ll probably find that establishing a daily routine to mark the transition between work and personal life will help you do this. For example, going for a walk before work and after work will help you separate these two areas from your life. ^{[5] X Research Sources}

Traveling from home to work will help you change your mindset from personal life to work.
Similar to limiting personal phone calls at work, if you walk in the morning with a clear mind and don’t think or talk about your private life, your colleagues won’t ask you questions.
If you look stressed or upset, or walk into the office while on the phone with your partner, don’t be surprised when co-workers start asking you questions.
You should think of this process as trying to actively manage the relationship between work and home life. ^{[6] X Research Sources}

Maintain a professional relationship at work

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Friendly. Even if you don’t want to share your personal life with co-workers, you have the potential to develop good working relationships that can make your time at work more enjoyable and productive. Finding a conversation topic to chat during lunchtime that doesn’t involve discussing the details of your private life won’t be difficult.

If someone at work talks about their personal life often, or if you don’t want to participate in any kind of conversation, politely leave. ^{[7] X Research Sources}
Talking about topics like sports, TV, and movies is a good way to get friendly and chat with colleagues without discussing personal matters.

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Be tactful. When a conversation is slowly turning into your private life, a subtle distraction can be quite a measure. You should avoid saying something like “Sorry, but that has nothing to do with you”. Instead, you should gently say, “Oh, you wouldn’t want to hear about that. That’s boring,” and then change to a topic you’re more comfortable with. ^{[8] X Research Sources}

Distracting techniques will help you maintain a friendly relationship and stay away from certain specific topics of conversation.
When you evade and change the subject instead of ending the conversation, your coworker won’t give it much thought.
If you redirect the conversation to your colleague, you’ll be able to avoid answering the other person’s question politely without appearing distant or disinterested.
You might say, “My life isn’t all that interesting, how about you?” ^{[9] X Research Source}
If your coworker insists on asking about your private life, you can set boundaries and let them know that you don’t want to discuss it. You could say, “I know that you guys are interested in asking about my life, and I appreciate it, but I don’t think I should discuss it.”

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A little flexible. While it’s important to establish boundaries between your work and personal life, you should also try to remain flexible. Sticking to boundaries doesn’t mean you should avoid certain interactions, or isolate yourself entirely. ^{[10] X Research Source}

If your coworker invites you out for drinks at 5pm. Join them from time to time, but be sure to stick to a topic of conversation you’re comfortable with.

Keeping your online life private

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Be careful with your social media activity. Increasingly, the biggest problem for people who want to keep their work and personal lives private is the proliferation of social media. People record every aspect of their lives and sometimes, they don’t understand that other people can easily access this information. The first step in dealing with the problem is simply being aware of it and thinking about how your social media activity might reveal parts of your private life that you’d rather keep private.

If you want to maintain a professional image online and don’t want people to question your privacy, you should avoid publicly posting anything that could threaten this issue. ^{[11] X Research Source}
It includes your messages and comments as well as your pictures. If you want to separate your personal life from your work, you need to do this both during and outside of work.
Don’t tweet or comment about work or colleagues on social media.
You can set up different social accounts to separate your personal and work life. ^{[12] X Research Source}
Consider connecting with colleagues at professional sites like LinkedIn, and set aside other sites like Facebook for family and friends. This measure will help you separate these two aspects.

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Adjust privacy settings. If you just want to use your online account to communicate with friends, you can completely use social networks without having to block your colleague’s friend requests. You should adjust your privacy settings so that you can limit the amount of information you share with your colleagues.

You can control the information you post online and to some extent control the access rights of others.
But you need to remember that once you post information online, it will not disappear quickly. ^{[13] X Research Source}

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Do not use work email for other purposes. So much of the interaction in our work and personal lives is done via email that your work email and personal email can become one. You need to be aware of these issues and take steps to ensure that you keep them separate. Always remember to use work email for work and personal email for other things.

Set a time when you will stop reading work email in the evening and stick to it.
Keeping the line between the two types of email will help you avoid having to carry your work with you wherever you go.
Depending on your position, you will have to develop a strategy to cut off contact at work accordingly. ^{[14] X Research Source}
In most cases, you can’t keep work email private. Your boss has permission to read any incoming or outgoing email in your work email account. You should move personal matters to a private email to avoid sharing any information that you would like to keep private. ^{[15] X Research Source}

Steps

Set boundaries between work and life

Maintain a professional relationship at work

Keeping your online life private

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