People underestimate the importance of having separate personal and work email accounts and calendars. It is great to have ones private and personal emails in separate mailboxes, so that if you want to get away from your work life and focus on your personal email you can. This extends to ones calendaring too - separate calendars for work appointments and personal events can be very useful.
This sort of separation is advantageous for lifestyle organisation too: it is good to know that certain times are reserved for work and others for play. It aids the balancing of ones work and personal lives, by enforcing a consciousness of the difference between work and non-work time. All of this is really very important in the lives of most people in the 21st century. It also provides a sense of lifestyle security.
Sarah Palin’s separation mess
In some peoples’ cases, it is politically important or important in terms of security to separate ones work and personal digital lives (ones emails, calendars, and such). Apparently Sarah Palin got in to trouble for allegedly breaching the Federal rule which creates the responsibility to separate ones work and personal email (or more appropriately, ‘public and private email’):
Sarah Palin’s [private] Yahoo email account was hacked by a group that calls themselves “Anonymous”. … Most of the emails seem to be messages of support, and photos of family. Nothing too exciting. But it’s been said that Palin and her associates all used private emails for government business.
The more important issue
The crux of this issue - which is far more interesting - is that technology often keep us constantly connected to everything and everyone in our lives, and it takes a conscious effort to mitigate this.
We now have mobile telephones, home telephones, email accounts, instant messaging accounts, and social networking accounts - our communication technology is ever-expanding. Indeed, as for social networking sites, although I love Facebook, my only big dislike of it is that it doesn’t allow for the adequate separation of work and personal friendships, and this is a distinction which is important for most people.
By separating ones email and calendars, it is possible to prevent a natural omnipresence whereby you would be connected to your business and personal life constantly and your brain under constant pressure from being connected with both spheres of life concurrently. It would be near-impossible to live a balanced lifestyle.
