I was really irritated the other day as my children wanted to sign on to Minecraft and needed to login to our Microsoft account. The annoyance was two-fold: (a) the Microsoft account has all of my business data in there; and (b) I couldn’t remember the username and password.
An hour later it was all sorted out, but it left me feeling angry and deflated for having to mix business and pleasure. Now, I’m sure there are many of you out there saying: why have you linked your business and personal accounts – get two! and I’m sure that is Microsoft’s strategy – as it generates double the revenues – but that’s not the point. The point is how easy it is to blur the lines between what is personal and what is business.
I realised this a long time ago when I first registered with Facebook and connected with everybody and anybody. Soon, it was obvious that having half of my social audience seeing me Zipwiring in Canada when it had no relevance to my business friends, and something I didn’t really want to share with them, that the mistake made was obvious: don’t mix business with pleasure.
Strangely enough, as I write that, there’s another discovery, which is that a lot of people do like to mix business with pleasure these days. On LinkedIn which, for me, was always meant to be a workplace, I’m finding more and more updates from my connections that are personal. Fund raising charity runs, family days out, cartoons and jokes are appearing more and more often on my stream, whereas it used to be all about jobs, job hunting, career updates and details about their work.
Vice versa on Facebook it has expanded the other way. People are updating about their work-life as well as their personal life. The lines have blurred.
It reminds me of the debate we had years ago about work-life balance; maybe we need to revive that debate today about social work-life balance. Where is it appropriate to say you are celebrating your wedding anniversary? Where should you post that you just got a new job or promotion? Is it appropriate to post on LinkedIn that you had a great weekend in Paris on holiday? Is it appropriate to post on Facebook that you had a great day at work solving an engineering issue?
What I’m getting at is that I always saw LinkedIn as work and Facebook as life. This was the work-life balance but, as with most things these days, that balance is no more. Do we have a work-life balance? Do we separate our work day and family days?
Strangely, when I ask that question, my answer is no. I work from home and the family are around me. There is no separation. It’s just life. The is no work-life balance. It’s just life.
Maybe the defining moment for this was that day when a child walked into a BBC interview and went viral …
This was followed by the pandemic, working from home, Zoom calls 24*7 and more. So, the real question being asked is whether work and home are really separated or integrated these days. What do you think?
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...