With the hours we work these days, often staying up late and putting in Saturdays and Sundays, it is inevitable that our personal and professional lives tend to overlap.
Personally, I often find it hard to balance out the overlapping, especially when it comes to phone calls.
The general rule I try to follow is simple: no personal calls from 9 to 5, unless it is an emergency. Of course, my friends and relatives often have a different idea of what constitutes an emergency. For my girlfriends it may be the annual sale at Sephora and for my mom her problem opening an email attachment.
Another issue here is, how to handle getting a personal call at work? I tend to act embarrassed and either run out of the room whispering or mute my cell and call back when nobody is around.
However, some of my colleagues seemed to be very OK about taking personal calls at the desk and even more OK with loudly discussing their personal issues. This way I got to learn a lot about a wide array of things about my co-workers: from the kids’ grades to their position on high heels versus flats.
So the question is: in today’s working world are personal calls an inevitable and welcome part of professional life, a cause for embarrassment or a complete taboo?
My instinctive guess is that we cannot cross out our personal relationships and ignore our friends and family. After all, they are what matters in the end. But we should aim for a balance. The starting point would be trying to schedule all our calls during a lunch break. Or, the next tome we have a few leisure minutes at work – use them to call a loved one (instead of surfing the net for celebrity gossip updates)
What do you think? Drop me a line at sales@cantreo.hk.