How to Keep Your Personal Life Private at Work

Maintaining personal privacy helps you project a professional image while enabling you to foster and sustain good relationships with colleagues. Allowing your personal life to influence your behavior can harm the way others perceive you at work. By setting clear boundaries, practicing self-discipline, and separating work life from personal life, you can protect your privacy without being viewed as a recluse at the office.

Decide on topics you shouldn't share. If you're aiming to keep your personal life private at work, the first step is to define clear boundaries. This will differ for each individual and depends on the culture within your company, as well as the work-life balance you're striving for. Regardless of workplace rules, you can still set your own boundaries. Start by listing topics you don't want to discuss with your coworkers.

• This may include topics like love life, illness, religious beliefs, and politics.
• Think about things you're uncomfortable sharing or discussing with your colleagues.
• Don't publicly announce your list—keep it in mind so you can gracefully exit conversations you prefer to avoid.

Know the questions that employers are not allowed to ask you. According to the law, there are many questions that employers cannot ask. These include questions related to family background and personal life, which could lead to racial discrimination. For example, employers cannot ask about your age, whether you have a disability, or your marital status. If someone asks you such a question at the company, you have the right not to answer. Some other questions you don’t have to answer include:

• Are you a U.S. citizen?
• Do you use drugs, smoke, or drink alcohol?
• What is your religion?
• Are you pregnant?
• What is your race?

Avoid personal phone calls at the office. If you are trying to keep work and personal life separate, you need to avoid bringing personal matters to the office. This means minimizing personal phone calls and emails while at work. Occasionally, you may make a call to schedule an appointment with a barber or dentist, but if your colleagues frequently hear you talking on the phone about personal matters, they may eavesdrop and ask about your conversations.

• Frequent personal phone calls can annoy your boss and make colleagues think you aren’t working hard.
• If you don’t want to take work-related calls when at home, don’t develop the habit of making personal calls while at work.

Don't bring family matters to the workplace. While easier said than done, it is important to try not to bring personal issues to the office and maintain absolute professionalism at work. You may find that creating daily habits to mark the transition between work and personal life will help you achieve this. For example, taking a walk before and after work can help separate these two aspects of your life.

• The commute from home to work will help shift your mindset from personal life to work mode.
• Similarly, if you walk in each morning with a clear mind and avoid thinking or talking about your personal matters, colleagues will not ask about your private life.
• If you look stressed or upset, or enter the office while talking on the phone with your partner, don’t be surprised if your colleagues begin to ask about it.
• You should consider this process as an effort to manage the balance between work life and family life.

Be friendly. Even if you don’t want to share personal details with your colleagues, you can still develop good work relationships that make your time at work more enjoyable and rewarding. Finding topics to chat about during lunch that don’t involve discussing your personal life will not be difficult.

• If someone in the office frequently talks about their personal life, or if you don’t want to engage in a certain conversation, you should politely excuse yourself.
• Discussing topics like sports, TV, and movies is a good way to become friendly and chat with colleagues without diving into personal matters.

Be Subtle. When a conversation is veering toward your personal life, subtly redirecting the discussion can be an effective approach. Instead of saying something like, "Sorry, but that's none of your business," try gently saying, "Oh, you wouldn't want to hear about that. It's pretty boring," and then steer the conversation to a more comfortable topic.

• The distraction technique helps maintain a friendly relationship while steering clear of specific topics you'd rather not discuss.
• By changing the subject instead of abruptly ending the conversation, your colleague is less likely to dwell on it.
• If you redirect the conversation toward your colleague, you can politely avoid answering their question without appearing distant or disinterested.
• You could say, "My life is pretty uneventful, how about yours?"
• If your colleague insists on probing into your private life, set boundaries and let them know you prefer not to discuss it. You could say, "I appreciate that you care enough to ask about my life, but I don't think it's appropriate to talk about it."

Be Flexible. While it's important to establish boundaries between your professional and personal life, it's also essential to remain flexible. Keeping your boundaries doesn't mean you should avoid certain interactions or isolate yourself completely.

• If a colleague invites you for a drink at 5 PM, consider joining them occasionally, but remember to stick to topics that you're comfortable discussing.

Be Cautious with Your Social Media Activity. With the rise of social media, maintaining privacy between your professional and personal lives has become more challenging. People often share every detail of their lives without realizing that others can easily access this information. The first step in addressing this issue is to be aware of it and think about how your social media activity can reveal aspects of your personal life that you want to keep private.

• If you want to maintain a professional online image and avoid people prying into your personal matters, you should refrain from publicly posting anything that could compromise this.
• This includes messages, comments, and photos. To separate your personal life from work, you need to practice this both during and after work hours.
• Avoid tweeting or commenting on work-related matters or your colleagues on social media.
• You may consider creating separate social media accounts to keep your personal and professional lives apart.
• Consider connecting with colleagues on professional sites like LinkedIn, and reserve sites like Facebook for family and friends. This approach will help you separate the two aspects of your life.

Adjust Your Privacy Settings. If you only want to use your social media accounts to stay in touch with friends, you can still do so without blocking colleague friend requests. You should adjust your privacy settings to control how much information you share with your colleagues.

• You can manage the information you post online and also control the level of access others have to it.
• However, keep in mind that once you post something online, it won't disappear quickly.

Do not use your work email for other purposes. Many interactions in both professional and personal life are carried out via email, which can make your work email and personal email blend together. It's important to be aware of this and take steps to ensure they remain separate. Always remember to use your work email for work-related matters and your personal email for everything else.

• Set a time when you'll stop checking work emails in the evening and stick to it.
• Maintaining boundaries between the two types of emails helps you avoid taking work with you everywhere you go.
• Depending on your position, you will need to develop a strategy to disconnect from work-related communication appropriately.
• In most cases, you cannot keep your work emails private. Your boss has the right to read any email sent or received in your work email account. You should transfer personal matters to your personal email to avoid sharing any information you want to keep private.