Keep your Self, family and Professional interests partitioned from each other

Every person has three principal interests in his/her life – Self, Family and the Profession. These are so intricately linked to each other that any adversity in one aspect affects the two others too. Thus, the whole life of the person may get jeopardized for a deficiency in one sphere of his/her life. Such a thing happens because persons don’t raise partitions in between these three aspects of life and let them intermingle with each other. This intermingling is a natural process while raising the partitions in between has to be arranged artificially.

What is Partitioning

A person lives three principal lives, or plays three roles, simultaneously, that of the person him/herself, that of member of his/her family, and that of a professional. In the first role, his/her main concern is of keeping good health – physically and mentally, in the second role, his/her concern remains togetherness, care and share of pleasures and pains in between family members, while the third role is the source of livelihood. In all these roles, the person finds much-needed reliefs of different kinds. Any role becoming problematic not only creates problem of that particular role but creates an imbalance in the person’s life, creating problems for the person to play other roles too. For example, a person feeling unhealthy can neither take good care of his/her family nor attend to his/her professional duties.

Partitioning of the three roles ensures that a problem on one account does not affect the other accounts. For example, a minor personal health problem if not shared with the family and the professional colleagues but dealt with effectively, may disappear soon without creating worries in the family and without much affecting his/her professional duties. Similarly, a professional problem if not carried to home, the person’s pleasures at home remain unaffected and thereby his/her health too remains normal.

For a partition, don’t inter-mix the three things but deal with each as a separate subject. When alone, think of own health and well-being, when with family, talk about family matters only, and when on professional duty, talk nothing but the work only. I understand that a total isolation of the three roles is impossible to achieve, but an effort to have it to the maximum extent is worth trying.      

Dimensions of Partitioning

The partition we are discussing about has three dimensions – time, space and social contacts. Having different timings reserved for the self, family and the profession is the first step towards partitioning. Keeping a room generally reserved for the self helps in isolating the self from the family, and having separate spaces for the family and performing professional duties is always desirable. The third dimension of social contacts is highly complicated and none can afford to have totally exclusive contacts for the self, family and the profession. These contacts often become common. A great mistake, professional colleagues often commit is discussing family matters in office and official matters at homes. What is meant by social partitioning is taking care of this – when at home, talk of family matters only and when at office don’t talk about family matters but official matters only.

Why Partitioning

Why do I suggest here to be artificial instead of being natural, as I often suggest through my writings and also preached by many learned persons? It is because we are no more leading natural lifestyles of wandering in jungles but have come up far away to be called civilized and socially organized. For this reason, I or anybody else never advises to go back to the jungle life of our primate form. We need to tune up with what we are and where we stand today. In this tuning, I suggest to artificially raise partitions in personal, family and professional lives of ours, with reasons of that I am going to discuss here.

If there is no adversity in any of these three aspects of life, all the three support each other through intermingling making the intermingling desirable. Conversely, if any one aspect becomes problematic for some reason, the intermingling of the three proves detrimental to others two also, blocking any possibility for the person to have some succor from any side. This succor to the person from any side helps him/her to overcome problems in other fields too. So, it is the succor to the person that plays a positive role in the person’s life, and for this, raising partitions becomes desirable.

It is often found that professionally successful persons often fail in having good family relationships, a person careful about the self is disliked by his/her family or professional colleagues. Such things make it difficult for a person to keep balanced fulfillment in all the three aspects of life. Somewhere, someone aspect goes weak as compared to others.  In case the three aspects are inter-mixed, any deficit on one account shall immediately be reflected on the other two aspects of life creating disorder in the life. Under such a situation, the person finds no place to relieve him/herself intensifying the problems. To prevent this weakness of one aspect from adversely affecting other aspects, partitioning becomes essential.