How To Separate Work From Personal Life

In the age of social media and fan clubs, more and more customers are following their favorite models, expecting to see the behind-the-scenes real life after the camera turns off. For models whose brand benefits from offering access to their off-camera life, it can become difficult to balance offering enough access to benefit financially, but still maintain privacy. When your online persona is very similar to your offline life, it can be hard to “turn off” work, especially when you share parts of your off-camera life on social media or with fan club content. Not every model struggles to separate their personal and professional lives, but if you’ve ever felt like you can’t “turn off” work, try these tips to give yourself some space for a private life.

Establish Work Hours

Establish work hours (and close the door) When an employee leaves their 9 to 5, that’s the end of their work day and they can get right into their personal life. When you have flexible hours and do it all yourself, that means it’s harder to walk away from work. In an ideal world, you have set work hours every day and when you’re done for the day, you close your cam room door and walk away. I recommend logging out of your accounts, shutting down your computer at the end of your chosen hours, and either closing the door to your office or cleaning up your work stuff from any other room that you work in.

Turning Off The Social Media Notifications

To get the most distance possible between your personal and professional lives, turn off social media notifications on your phone. When you’re working you can check them manually anyway, and when you’re not working you probably don’t need to respond to every tweet in 30 seconds or less. If you’re not ready to turn all of your notifications off all the time, try just doing it for a few hours on a day you’re not working and see what you think. I promise you won’t miss anything if you don’t get a push notification that someone commented “HOT <3” on a 6 month old Instagram photo.

Take A Day Off Work

Working 7 days a week is not good for anyone, and it’s not sustainable. Take 1 day off – and I mean fully off. Don’t check your work social media, don’t read your site messages or emails. Don’t live post to your social media accounts (I pre-schedule Twitter and Instagram posts for days I’m off work so that my social media is actively working even when I’m not). Don’t even check your sales. Turn it all off and get away from it. No one is paying enough to get access to your life every single day of your life, and you need at least one day each week to completely get away from work to recharge and fully invest yourself in your personal relationships and activities.

Keeping Up With Personal Social Media

I love baseball Twitter. It’s hilarious and amazing (especially when your team is terrible) to follow along with the game live on Twitter. Instead of logging in to my work account to follow my sports stuff, I made a personal Twitter account (and no, you can’t have my handle). I can follow whoever I want, heart and retweet anything and everything without considering how it would impact the image I have created for myself as Katy Churchill. I can live-tweet baseball without losing followers or burying the promotional content that I worked so hard to create and share. Most of all, though, it gives me some separation between doing something in my off-hours like watching sports and my work because it’s not right in my face in the same account. I don’t have to resist checking my DMs or notifications because they’re not even there.

Sharing Hobbies and Personal Interests

Sharing your life off-camera can be lucrative for models who specialize in a very authentic, raw, GFE-type style. Sharing hobbies and interests can build connections with your followers and give depth to your online persona, but holding something back gives you the freedom to enjoy an activity without the nagging voice in the back of your mind reminding you to take a snap for social media.

Separate Work Clothes From Real Clothes

A lot of Work Katy’s clothes would get me arrested or at least shouted at a lot if Off-Work Katy wore them out in public, so that’s not really an issue. Off-Work Katy has clothes and jewelry that belong just to her, though. I don’t wear them in videos, I don’t wear them on cam, and I don’t take photos or videos for social media when I’m wearing them. It sounds a bit weird, but having items of clothing that create a work-free zone around me can be really freeing, and serve as a tangible physical reminder to put my professional life aside and focus on my personal life.