Increasing numbers of people are deciding to either work from home or set up their own small business from home. This is a brilliant step to take, as it means that you can be your own boss and only have to answer to yourself.

You can also earn a whole lot more money when you’re not limited to set or limited working hours. However, when you work from home, you’ll soon realise that you can find difficulties in separating your personal life and your professional life.

But not to worry. There are certain steps that you can take in order to help maintain your privacy in this situation. Here are just a few to consider!

Make Use of a Forwarding Address

When you set up your small business, you’ll legally have to register your business to an address. Many small business owners decide to register their business to their own address. This would seem to make sense if you are working from home.

However, this isn’t an option that provides you with all too much privacy. After all, your registered business address will be freely available to members of the public.

Your registered business address will also be the same address that any professional correspondence will be sent to, so you may want to avoid mixing up your personal and professional mail.

Instead, you should invest in a mail forwarding address. Any mail that is sent to this address can be forwarded to you as and when you please.

Investing in a Business Phone

Sure, it may be tempting to use your personal phone as a work phone. This would essentially halve your phone expenses on a monthly basis, as you will only have to fork out for one phone contract, and you will only have to fork out for one phone insurance policy too.

But using your personal phone for professional purposes can come hand in hand with all sorts of problems. First, do you really want your personal number to be widely available to the general public? You could experience all sorts of prank calls or messages around the clock.

If you have a personal phone, you can leave this on through the night in order to receive potential emergency or important personal calls around the clock. If you have a professional phone too, you can simply turn this off outside of operating hours and pick up any voicemails or messages when you head back into your workspace.

Having two separate phones also means that you significantly reduce your risk of leaking personal images or information to people you only know on a professional level. Your personal phone can contain all sorts of personal information and you use it to send personal messages.

You don’t want to accidentally send an image of your pet dog to a marketing agency or web designer instead of your latest product photography. You also don’t want to accidentally send a message intended for your partner or best friend to a potential client or business partner.

Keeping the personal and the professional well apart in different devices means that generally speaking, purchasing a second phone or taking out a second phone contract for a professional phone is more than worth the investment. All you need to do is make you can distinguish between your work phone and personal phone - perhaps by making sure they have different coloured cases or different iPhone wallpapers - and both are secured by strong passwords or face ID, and you're ready to go.

Setting Up a Professional Email Address

You’ve probably picked up on a trend by now - you want to keep your personal and your private life separate. As you may have guessed, this logic can also be applied to your email address. Think just how much spam mail or commercial mail you receive on a daily basis.

Do you really want to have to sift through all of these messages in order to find important emails regarding work, collaborations, orders, or partnerships? Sure, you can unsubscribe from mailing lists. But there will be plenty that you want to stay updated on.

Generally speaking, it is much better to create an additional email address solely for professional use. You can then also use this email address to conduct marketing campaigns, sending updates up to individuals who may have signed up to your business’ mailing list, while maintaining an authoritative and trustworthy presence. When setting up a mailing list, it might be best to use a list hosting service to help keep everything together and streamlined for optimal output.

These are just a few different ways that you can maintain your privacy while working from home. Start implementing them into the way you run your business as soon as possible!