Is it really possible to separate the personal from the professional? I have been struggling with this issue for the past few months both in my daily life as well as my blogging. What follows is a description of the struggle and explanation of why I ultimately have decided to start a new blog (Associated Knowledge) to serve as my public speaking venue and focusing this blog on my personal / family life. For those of you who have bookmarked Nomadic Learning, I would appreciate it if you could change your bookmark to http://www.associatedknowledge.com and update your RSS feeds as well. Please read on for more details.

Many of you have come to know me through my Nomadic Learning blog. Initially I had intended to use it as a way to share my thoughts surrounding life, my family and my travels. I also figured that while I was at it, I could use it as a portfolio to showcase some of my work and technology related experiments. For almost 9-months that is exactly how I kept it and it wasn’t until I attended the ASAE Technology Conference in February of this year that things started to change.

It was at that point that I not only found additional topics to write about, but I also discovered a network of like-minded individuals (The Association Blogoclump) who were also interested in similar topics and were passionate about sharing their thoughts. At that point I tried to maintain my blog as dual-purpose, but I quickly realized that similar to my actual life, separating what is personal from professional online is not an easy thing to do.

I really do love my family and know that there is more than enough material that I could share in a blog format. My family and I have the opportunity to do a lot of really fun things together. And with a toddler in the house, there is never a shortage of activity to write about and share pictures of. However, I am also extremely passionate about the association that I work for, the work that I do, and talking about the intersection of technology, learning and associations. While I am not able to discuss many of the specifics of my day-to-day work, I have been able to share my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences in more of a general manner pretty regularly since I started blogging about it.

A few weeks ago, my son and I accompanied my wife on a trip to a conference in Detroit she was attending. It was at that point when I realized the true challenge of blogging about professional activities and personal life in the same venue. During the time that we spent in Detroit my son and I made many memories (visiting Comerica Park and Ford Field, attending the Detroit Autorama, etc.) but I really didn’t feel it was appropriate the share those pictures with folks who read my blog for thoughts and ideas related to technology and associations.

Shortly after I returned from the trip, I put a considerable amount of time and energy into rethinking my entire blogging strategy. Could I separate my personal life and professional life and still have enough energy and enthusiasm to write about both, while giving 100% to my family and my job? How would the separate impact (positive or negative) those who have become regular readers? Would I lose the results of all of the work I have put into building and establishing my blog as a source of relevant, reliable and hopefully mildly informative and entertaining materials? What do I do with all of the legacy content related to one blog but not the other. Could I make the transition seamless? Was this the beginning of the end or just a new beginning?

These thoughts plagued my mind as I struggled with the decision. As an added impact, my posting and blog reading dwindled to nearly nothing. I knew that I had to be fully committed to whatever decision I made, so I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to weigh all of the variables. Finally, I knew that I was starting to suffer from “analysis-paralysis” and needed to simply make a decision. The answer to my question seemed to be in front of me from the beginning…I wanted to be focused and dedicated to both my personal life and my professional life therefore that kind of focus requires separation. And separation requires a new blog to handle my professional side so I can return this blog to things more personal to me.

For the past two weeks I have been spending all of my time getting my act together. As anyone knows who has set up their own blog it’s a time consuming process. Fortunately for me I am intimately familiar with WordPress and have set-up a number of blogs for family, friends and colleagues and know the platform pretty intimately. There is certainly much that I still have to learn about it, but I know how to get a new WP Blog up and running quickly and the making customizations are getting easier too.

Knowing that the technology was only half of the battle I also had to come up with not only a new domain name but also an entirely new look and feel in order to achieve complete separation. As fate and luck would have it both fell into place relatively easily. While I won’t go into the specifics of how I chose my new blog name (good material for a future post), lets just say that I wanted it to be easy to remember, specific enough to address the topics that I will be discussing, and vague enough to allow me to post about the things I am passionate about but not niche me too far into one specific topic.

Since I want to focus on topics related to learning, community, leadership, and technology and I wanted it to be specific to the association world, I knew I had my work cut out for me. The net-result is my new blog name (Associated Knowledge) and corresponding domain name (http://www.associatedknowledge.com). Sure it is longer than the domain-naming experts recommend but I think it will be very easy to remember, so the compromise was easy to make.

The other challenge I had to face was the look and feel of the blog. This site was designed specifically for my friends and family and to be quite honest it was more about what I wanted than what a broader audience would want. And while I did focus on some of the usability / findability aspects in the initial design, I didn’t put that at the forefront of my work. What This translates into is a site that is standards compliant, visually attractive by many standards, but somewhat difficult to use and navigate. It also places too much focus on me and not enough on what I am writing.

I knew much of this had to change for my new site, especially if I wanted to hold on to my current readers, attract new ones and keep the site useful for everyone. This translated into a lengthy search for a theme that met my usability and information architecture needs but also was very unique. Quite honestly it wasn’t an easy task. While one of the greatest strengths of WordPress is the fact that so many themes do exist for it, many are simply not up to the task of supporting all of my specific needs, and those that were also happened to be in wide use and therefore were not unique.

Again, through a stroke of luck I came across a really talented developer by the name of Brian Gardner who has developed a number of really nice WP themes and also runs his own design company. He also had a pretty unmistakable blog of his own with a design that I really liked so I reached out to him. After discussing my needs we were able to strike a deal that secured me a pretty unique design and benefited Brian as well. Granted all I really received was the structural elements, I still had to change the look and feel to my liking, but it was considerably easier than starting from scratch.

After many hours spent under the hood of WordPress and working in Fireworks, I was able to customize the theme and give it a unique and hopefully a memorable design. I also worked to enhance the user-experience through the use of social-networking tools, feeds, and easy navigation. While it is very much a work in progress, I am quite pleased with the results.

So to come full-circle on my initial question: is it possible to separate personal from professional? Well my experience was largely about blogging, but it is also metaphorical because it required me to take a look at both spheres of my life and determine what was important. What I found throughout the process is that I do love being a family-man but I am also very passionate about my work. However, to be fair to both some level of separation needs to be established. For me it means separating my personal blog from my professional blog and it also means being an association professional and technologist at work and being a husband, daddy, son, brother and friend at home.

Separation is possible but it isn’t easy and does require focus, dedication, and perseverance. And while there are no guarantees, I am hopeful and optimistic given the rather auspicious start I have enjoyed. Again as a friendly reminder please update any bookmarks or link to this site to http://www.associatedknowledge.com and update any feeds as well.

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