Keeping a balance between the personal and the professional is hard — particularly given the pervasiveness of technology. However, there are some valid and pretty important reasons to keep your personal email (and files) completely separate from your professional email (and files).
It helps you strive for work/life balance.
It’s not just about taking that vacation time (which you should — fewer and fewer Americans are actually using their vacation days). Having a healthy work-life balance is crucial for your mental and physical health, and can help stave off stress and burnout.
It helps you avoid embarrassing mistakes.
Most email clients auto-populate email addresses based on the first few letters you type. It’s easy to send a message about your dry cleaning to your dean by mistake.
It is practical.
We love Texas Woman’s! But life is a journey and you could get a dream job call tomorrow. Imagine trying to separate out your personal email and files from your work at a moment’s notice. (Rather than taking some time to tackle that project over a few weeks….)
It is an appropriate use.
Texas Woman’s provides everyone an email address to conduct university- and course-related business. Netflix updates and World Market coupons aren’t university-related 97% of the time.* And as our general counsel informed us Dec. 2, 2019:
"According to state law, all information that is “written, produced, collected, assembled, or maintained … in connection with the transaction of official business” is public information. That includes any official communication related to official TWU business, whether in e-mail, text or file format. This is the case whether the information is located on a device issued by TWU or it is located on an employee’s privately owned device (i.e. cell phone, laptop, tablet, etc.) or personal email account. It is the content of the message and not the medium through which the message is delivered that determines whether information is public information."
Certain public information, including business-related text messages on a private device and emails on a private email platform, must be either archived by the employee, or turned over to the university for preservation.
Bottom line: Keeping a strong barrier between personal and professional communication is a best practice.
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*not an actual statistic