What a coincidence that the first day of my internship falls on my birthday! It is very hard to balance both professional and personal lives. When we do start a new job, we often ask ourselves, “Is it OK to have a close relationship with our colleagues?” or “is it OK to add them on Facebook?” One of the dilemmas of modern life is how to manage one’s connections’ and relationships’ on social media. The big question is how do we separate our professional lives from our personal lives?
Ideally, it is better to keep both areas separated but it is hard to achieve that. We all use the same brain in every situation. How will you switch off some regions of your brain depending on the surroundings? My experience is that it is all mixed up.
Professionalism is fundamental in this case. Once you start connecting with colleagues, especially on Facebook, you will want to maintain a professional presence and not forget the responsibilities you have for the company, but of course, you might still want to share those crazy party photos and, in my case, birthday celebrations.
In order to separate your work network from your friends, you will want to create friend lists. At minimum, you will want to create a list with the people you work with. You can use this list to post updates that are only to be shared with your work colleagues, but more importantly, you can use this list to post updates that are to be hidden from work colleagues. You may also want to add mutual friends of yours and your work colleagues to that list as some updates are shared to friends of friends as well.
At the end of the day, it is up to you to make the judgement of whether to mix business with pleasure. Everyone is different and have different backgrounds and work ethics. Just do what you think it’s right for you.
X Hannah
