Keeping your private life private can help you present a professional image while still enabling you to develop and maintain good working relationships with your colleagues. Allowing your private life to have too big an impact on your job conduct can harm perceptions of you at work. By establishing some sensible boundaries, exercising self-control, and separating your work and home worlds you can keep your private life private without being considered aloof at work.

Decide what not to talk about

The first thing to do if you are trying to keep your private life private at work is to determine where exactly you want to draw the line. This will vary from person to person and according to the particular culture at your workplace, as well as what kind of balance between work and home life you are looking for. Whatever the norm is in your office, you can still draw up your own boundaries. Start by making a list of the things you don’t want to discuss with your colleagues.

Know what employers cannot ask you

There are a number of questions that, by law, your employers cannot ask you about. These are questions about your background and life which could lead to discrimination. For example, your employer cannot ask you how old you are, whether you have any disabilities, or whether you are married or not.

Cut out personal calls at work

If you are trying to keep your work and private life separate then you need to avoid bringing your private life into the office with you. This means cutting downs on private calls and emails from the office. Occasional calls to make an appointment with the hairdresser or dentist are fine, but if you are frequently heard on the phone talking about your private life, not only will your colleagues most likely overhear you, but they may ask you about the conversation

Be friendly

Even if you don’t want to discuss your private life with your colleagues, you can still develop good working relationships that make your time at work more enjoyable and productive. It’s easy to find topics of conversation for lunchtime small talk that don’t involve you talking about any intimate details of your private life.

Use tact

If you find yourself in a conversation that is turning to your personal life, or a colleague has asked you about something that you would rather keep private, it’s a good idea to tactfully sway out of the way of the question. Try to avoid saying something like “Sorry, but that’s none of your business”. Instead, make light of it and say something more like “Oh, you don’t want to know about that. It’s boring” and then change the subject to something you are more comfortable with.

Be aware of your social media activity

Increasingly the biggest problem for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate is the proliferation of social media. People record all aspects of their lives and sometimes don’t fully comprehend how accessible all of this information is to anybody who cares to look for it. The first step to tackling this problem is simply being aware of it and thinking about how your social media activity could reveal parts of your private life you’d rather keep out of the office.

Only use your work email for work

So much communication in our working lives and our lives outside work is conducted through email, that it can be easy for your work email and personal email to blend into one. You should be conscious of this and take steps to make sure you keep the two separate. Always use your work email for work and your personal email for everything else.