So, do you try to separate your personal from your business email? Does it bug you when friends use your work email address to send you information that should fall in the personal area? Are you paranoid about employers knowing too much about your personal life through info contained in your work email?
At the risk of sounding dogmatic, I am all for the separation of personal and work email! I might be in the minority, but I just don’t like receiving personal emails of any kind on my business/work email account. In most of my email and web dealings I try to separate my business persona from my personal one, although I don’t often succeed.
I work in the email industry, so you can be sure that I have a lot of email addresses, more than I need. Here’s a list (not exhaustive):
- Business: multiple variations of it (4)
- Personal: Gmail, which I use mostly for alerts, as I am not a huge fan of their client and I am not a searcher when it comes to email (1)
- Personal: yahoo, my main personal email address (3), with variations that I use for various activities, such as online shopping
- Unintentional: Facebook, what the heck, I clicked ok because I wanted to check out the interface and see how Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill email
- (Frankly, too many more…)
My blackberry (admission: I am loyal Canadian Blackberry user, who wants RIM to succeed, but is feeling increasingly weary watching iPhone and now Android completely decimate them…) gives me the option to separate them, and I like that. I can either view my emails from all my accounts together under a single ‘Messages’ banner, or I can view separately the messages from each of my email accounts under their own individual banner. I tend not to use the ‘Messages’ banner, as I have very different expectations of what kind of message will be received in a certain account. I usually put myself in a very different mindset when I am reading a work-related email as opposed to a personal one. In one case, the email might contain information about a difficult bug encountered close to release time, while the other would have something about picture day at my son’s soccer practice. I am big on flow and don’t like switching contexts too quickly. I know that many of you will say that the bug email is just as important as the picture day one, because nobody wants to disappoint an 8-year-old by forgetting to bring their game jersey to practice! I agree, I am just arguing that I prefer to focus on one thing at a time, giving full attention to each when the time is right for each of them.
Keeping personal and business separate also means that I don’t want important, private and personal information to be included in my work email, such as travel or vacation plans, purchases, personal exchanges with family members or relatives, and other such data. It’s not that there’s anything to hide (sorry, Eric Schmidt), it’s just that it’s private and I don’t care for my business to have access to that information.
Most of my friends have my business and personal email addresses. Email clients being what they are today, you can be sure that they don’t bother checking which address they use to send me messages. So, invariably, I get emails about Saturday’s jam session or Thursday night’s dinner reservation on my work email. In some bad cases, I receive those dreadful joke-forwarding emails from friends at my work email, in which case I clearly ask them not to use that address for such communication.
Ok, I have to admit, I afford special treatment to my immediate family. My wife and my 11-year-old daughter (who takes the odd break from texting to send an email although she finds it takes sooooo loooong) have special privileges: they can use any address they want, and they get responses, and they do so quickly! But hey, if you want to send me email asking me where I’m watching game 6 of the Stanley Cup final, please use my personal address.
Would love to hear your thoughts on personal and business email separation.
I also have a number of email addresses. Self-hosted for various personal domains (4), work (2 mailboxes & too many aliases I care to count), and legacy hotmail/yahoo/gmail (4-5) which were used in various scenarios. They’re mostly obsolete now, but I keep them around as some people keep using them.
I never mix personal and work. That is true for social networks (LinkedIn=Work, Facebook=Personal, Twitter=Whatever) and email.
There are various reasons for my behavior, the two most important being:
1) Productivity.
- Volume: when at work, I already receive between 100 and 200 emails a day, there is no way I want to add an additional 5-20 personal stuff
- Context: avoid context switches as much as possible. They are the biggest productivity killers (along with interruptions).
- Priorization: sorry friend, but when I’m at work, your request to know if will attend your birthday party can wait until the evening when I’m at home. The only exception is my immediate family, and I prefer they use the phone (my mobile or work)
2) Privacy
My personal email content is my own. There is no way I want it stored on corporate backup servers, sniffed by network tools or email auditing, or looked at by curious employees.
In conclusion, I really have two separate domains as well, one for work, and one for my personal life.
Personal and work e-mails of course should be used separately. Work accounts are checked by the bosses. I have 5 e-mails, and use them when I like to,
. One primary, and the others, for background services, when I forget my password, and this often occurs.