Originally posted on Paypal Community on October 2.

Can you even remember a time when we had separation between our personal and professional lives online? Before the days of weekend and late night emails from your boss, before your eager new coworker friended you within five minutes on the job, or before someone you met once at a work event felt it was appropriate to ask you to endorse them online or retweet their random charity bike ride? In a world where we know more and more about one another, a world where you can Google someone you’re interviewing and immediately get an entire dossier on their lives to date, how can we better navigate the increasingly muddy waters of the web within our work and home lives?

We all know people who take an extreme viewpoint on this. Some people are ok with sharing absolutely everything about their lives online: what they ate for breakfast, their children’s potty training misadventures, their wild experiences at Burning Man – and they couldn’t care less if it’s their boss or their grandma seeing it. At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who don’t share anything. You won’t find them on Twitter or Instagram, they’ll tell everyone and anyone who will listen that they aren’t on Facebook, as if it’s a badge of honor, and a Google search turns up next to nothing.

But most of us fall somewhere in between. And that’s where things get complicated.

7 Professional Connectivity Tips

Greater connectivity in the workplace provides us with so much opportunity. There’s more freedom to work remotely or work more flexible hours. Mobile devices enable a greater percentage of the population to be their own boss and work as freelancers. And having access to endless information at our fingertips allows us to quickly and easily gain new skills and seek out valuable connections and job opportunities. Knowing more about our co-workers means that we feel a deeper connection to them because we’ve seen pictures of their children, or know that they also love skiing. However, nothing is ever 100% positive or easy, and with the new opportunity that all this connectivity brings, it also brings some new challenges in how we navigate relationships with our co-workers, and try to maintain a bit of that old-fashioned personal and professional life balance.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to connectivity and our professional lives:

1. Understand that your online reputation is not just what you post about yourself, but also what your friends post about you. You could be the most rigorous person ever in controlling the image you portray to the world online, but what your friends and strangers say about you also shows up online. So make sure to surround yourself with people who truly have your best interest at heart, and stay on top of your search results and online profiles to make sure you’re in control of the areas you can be.

2. If you have a “digital doppelganger” (someone with the same name as you) who has unsavory search results, consider your options. Like it or not, the first thing someone is going to do before meeting you is search for you online. If you have a common name, or someone with the same name as you who shows up first/poorly in results, consider using a middle initial or a nickname to differentiate yourself, and make sure potential interviewers know that!

3. Be authentic, but balanced. Nobody wants to be friends with someone whose online profile is totally sterile or who only posts promotional pieces about the company they work for. On the other hand, it’s also off-putting to see someone who sits next to you at work, sharing their breast-feeding chart on Instagram (I actually saw this happen!). It’s ok to show that you’re a human. And it’s ok to admit that you’re not perfect all the time. But if you took a glimpse at your last 5 posts at any moment in time, they should present a balanced, accurate look at who you are, both professionally and personally.

4. Which means…we need to cut each other a bit more slack. I’ve definitely had experiences where a co-worker was taking FOREVER getting back to me over email, and then suddenly, I saw them post on Facebook. Wait a minute? They’re online, and they have the time to be posting pictures, but they’re not responding to me! How rude! I’m offended! We have to remind ourselves that we live in a world where we now go online all the time, both for business and for pleasure, and just because someone is online doesn’t mean that they are always working. (Unless it is work hours and they work for you, and they should be working. Then that’s just poor decision making on their part!)

5. It’s totally ok to not be friends with your colleagues on every single social network. It’s perfectly acceptable to tell your colleagues that you keep your social networks limited to close friends and family. Or just leave them pending in “friend purgatory” until they get the hint on their own. What you don’t want to do is accept some co-workers and not others, or have to unfriend people who you work with because you feel uncomfortable with them seeing your posts. Ouch.

6. Set boundaries on your own personal tech/life balance. Believe it or not, it is ok to not be reachable 100% of the time. Unless you are a doctor on call, the world is not going to end if you step away from your phone for a few minutes. People will treat you how you demand to be treated. Everyone has fire drills once in a while that require working later or longer than normal, but if your boss is making a habit of emailing you late at night and you’re making a habit of responding right away, you only have yourself to blame. Setting the precedent of responding right away actually makes it harder to then suddenly set boundaries at a later date. You can train your co-workers that you don’t respond to emails late at night. Or that you unplug a bit more on the weekends. Being responsive doesn’t mean being on a leash – it means responding within a reasonable, acceptable window – and often times, waiting a little while helps guarantee that your reply will be more thoughtful. And if you’re the one initiating the late night emails for whatever reason (maybe you’re a late night person and that’s your most productive time), a courteous thing to do is to let people know that you don’t expect an immediate response.

7. Find a messaging protocol that works for you. If you have a client who sends you text messages all the time, but you’d much prefer if they emailed you, tell them! There are so many ways to reach people these days – it’s really helpful to let people know how you prefer to be contacted. And it’s okay to send people gentle reminders from time to time, such as “hey there – I know text messages are really fast, but it’s hard for me to keep track of our correspondence – can you please email me moving forward?” If you truly don’t want business contacts to call or text you, consider not even putting a phone number on your business cards.

Connectivity can be both our best friend and our worst enemy in the workplace. But if you put the same thought and energy into your online presence that you put into your job, you’ll find that the blurred lines can actually serve as a tremendous advantage.

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