3by9

Business vs Personal

When you work with a group of people for an extended period of time relationships start to form. These could be simple friendships, romantic interests or just developing a group of people to go out with on the weekends. These relationships can conflict with your work though, but as humans we are inclined to social behavior so they are almost impossible to prevent. With our small group here these conflicts can reach an even grander scale because there is no where to hide.

I am great friends with Mike and Tyme and I like to believe I know them very well. Because of this I know what approaches work with them with regards to asking questions and assigning tasks and I know what will easily piss them off. The issue I use to have was always concerning myself whether our friendships would deterioriate because of how I treated them from a business standpoint.

Now we have had our rough patches, probably more than usual for a small company, but take into consideration we don’t get to see each other face to face so misunderstandings happen a lot and we sometimes deciphering sarcasm from brutal honesty can be difficult.

What I’ve come to realize that as much as we like to pretend that business and personal should be separated most of the time they just aren’t. If one of us is having a bad day then it is almost unfair to think that you should treat them as you have any other day because you are part of a business. If a person wants to take the time to tell me about the weekend they had between the hours of 9-5 who am I to complain about it? Really what is the difference?

I don’t think I am going out on a limb by saying that because of our business ties our friendships have been saved more times than not. I can name a number of occasions where if we were simply friends we would have all walked away from each other because as they say “who needs friends like these?” So while you may be sitting there cursing the gods for making Patty the hot girl in accounting work for the same company as you, I thank the gods daily for keeping Tyme and Mike in business with me otherwise they would have left me stranded with nothing but my 9rules pillow to call friend.

I fuck up a lot when it comes to communicating. It’s my selfish nature to cut people off, tease them or simply inquire why they are talking to me about a certain subject. Too often I separate the business with the friend and don’t realize that when we talk we are talking as friends who just happen to be in business together. It’s really the best of both worlds once you realize and get used to it.

When I started working for myself I always said the only aspect of company work that I missed was the ability to interact with others daily. Now I have that on an almost 24/7 basis and sometimes I find myself complaining about it. I just can’t seem to win with myself, but that is no surprise since idiots always lose.

So instead of thinking of it as business vs personal, maybe there should be a greater synergy between the two than you think. Besides, listening to Tyme talk about her WoW adventures or Mike tell a story of the dog making a mess of things will always be more entertaining than trying to figure out RSS aggregator issues.