Life vs Work

December 17, 2020

One of the best things I did for my mental health this year is to better separate personal and work stuff, at least in the digital realm.

When you are an employee, that separation is mandated. You get your work chat and work email, and it’s easy to keep things separate because there is no other option.

When you work for yourself or with a friend, it’s easy to ignore this and use your personal email for everything, regular chat apps for communication, and the like. This is fine to get things off the ground, but I believe it’s best to start doing things “right” after a while.

Doing things right for me meant two things.

1/ Having a work chat (Slack) and not relying on Telegram so much. In the process, I rediscovered the pleasure of chatting with a friend (who happens to be my co-founder) at night and on weekends about stuff that’s not work.

2/ Moving all work-related notifications to my work email and using separate apps for work and personal email addresses. This helped in reducing the mental switch I need to do when processing my inbox. Looking at that Amazon order notification while reviewing the latest issue on Sentry fucked up with my brain.

As a result, chat apps are usually a pleasure to look at with friends reaching out, memes, and the likes. My personal email inbox is mostly empty, with the occasional notification. All my newsletters get routed to Mailbrew’s Inbox anyway.