Everybody likes to talk about work-life balance. In a constantly connected and hyper-social, always on and always open world, it’s become increasingly hard to strike a balance. Whether you work in an office, at home, or on the road, there is a lot of pressure for high availability.

Always On

The fact that we have the ability to be constantly connected to work, e-mail, the Internet and social networks is great.

But what about those times when you just want to be alone, or with loved ones? It can be hard for some people (especially tech geeks/Web 2.0 types) to stop for a minute and put down the Blackberry, turn off the computer, and go dark.

It becomes even harder when you consider that many of us do this for a living. When and how do you separate blogging, reading, Twittering, and social networking for fun and personal use vs. for work? Most everyday social network users and bloggers don’t have the added dilemma and pressure to do it all the time.

Tips to Turn it Off After Hours

• Leave the laptop at work. Unless you have a huge deadline, pressing project, or are expecting something critical to come in that you need to work on…it can usually wait until tomorrow. Besides, you will feel much less stress if you work hard during the day (or stay late), and can go home worry free.
• Try to avoid Twitter. I have a problem where my brain functions in a way that I am always thinking I should tweet something, or I should blog about something. Random thoughts pop into my head that I want to get down. In the end, does it really matter? Will my snarky and witty comment on Ironman change the world? Probably not. Talk about it later.
• Know your boundaries. I’m much more likely to check my Blackberry and Twitter on weeknights than on weekends. I’ve learned over the past few months that you just can’t do it all, all the time. Know when you need to work hard and be available, or when to stop and avoid burnout.

Privacy

Where do you draw the line on what you do or don’t share with the general public? Being out there in the public eye, some of us are almost required to be accessible and available. Not only that, but in order to be successful in social media, you have to be yourself. But, how much of yourself are you supposed to share?

Giving a little glimpse into your personal life is important, whether it’s through personal interactions, sharing favorite restaurants or movies, empathizing about car or work woes or using your personal thoughts and ideas to participate in general crowdsourcing. (Thanks @rmoede for the links.) But, there are a few things to keep in mind to help define the line between oversharing and undersharing.

Tips on Privacy

• Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want a future significant other or employer to find. The Google spiders are powerful forces. Consider the consequences (for yourself and others) of what you write and share online in blogs, comments, Twitter, or personal website profiles.
• Talk to your significant other and employer about what they are comfortable with you sharing. Make the decision together. Often an open discussion or a simple disclaimer on your blog or profile can make a big difference for your job and personal life.

It’s a big, interconnected web world out there. And it’s about to get even more connected with the launch of Google Friend Connect.

Imagine what will happen to the web when any website has the ability to become its own social network. What will that do to our current networks? How will it help or hurt social media and web 2.0 evangelists?

Certainly then, we will have to make even more of a conscious effort to unplug, establish privacy boundaries, and consider the fact that we are moving towards an even greater socialized web.

Ever since I read this article in GigaOm about Xobni, I’ve been excited to try it. It’s finally available to the masses, and it’s a pretty cool little application.

Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards, and that’s pretty much where your traditional inbox ends. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.

One of the nice features of the profile is that it shows you the frequency of your e-mails, ranks users based on how many messages are exchanged (Geoff is my number 1), and shows a chart with the hour of the day that e-mails are most frequently sent, the number of e-mails received vs. e-mails sent and more.

Attachments are easy to find, as are conversations (e-mail threads) between multiple parties. Another great feature is the ability to call a contact directly using Skype and a quickly generated e-mail meeting schedule option which pulls free times from your calendar. You can also compose e-mail directly from Xobni (it will generate a new Outlook message) by clicking on a link in the toolbar profile.

In addition to the handy toolbar on the side of your outlook (which can be minimized if you don’t want to look at stats), there is an analytics program option that reveals even more into your daily, weekly, and monthly email usage. The ability to switch between line and bar graphs is also cool, and the breakdown between hour, date, time, etc.

A daily view of mail traffic can reveal that you see a big increase during the middle of the week.

A weekly view shows steady traffic back and forth, with fluctuations for high-pressure times (around a product launch, large pitching initiative, marketing campaign, etc.). You can view a daily summary of e-mails, including “unique people” (which separates out groups), and sent to received ratios.

There is an easy option to share reports by e-mail, as well as copy, print, and save functions. The tool offers options on how you want to view your email (say, only Monday-Friday), a useful welcome video and support FAQ and contact form.

Buzz Meter: 4 out of 4 Buzz Bees

Positive: For people who don’t like to sort and search through e-mail, this is a handy way to view recent conversations, sent attachments, and networks of relationships. This is an exciting, useful and functional tool that is great for stats geeks and people who want a better way to organize their inbox.

Negative: Xobni is not available for Mac users or those running earlier versions of Outlook. Also, some people may not want another toolbar added to their e-mail (although you can minimize it).

Conclusion: Xobni is a nice tool that is fairly unobtrusive, while allowing stats geeks the ability to fully analyze their e-mail usage. Xobni has the ability to show people how they are using their time, and maybe push them to strive towards a 4-hour work week, e-mail free.