If you are like so many business professionals, the one thing you dread is having your company’s mobile phone on you at times when you are ‘off the clock.’
How many times have you been out to dinner with the wife and suddenly the phone clipped to your belt starts ringing nonstop?
You know it’s not your wife because she’s seated across the table from you, and it’s not the kids, they’d be calling your wife!
So, you can safely assume it’s the job, but you are, after all, on your time and your dime.
This is where a second phone number would come in handy and if you want our advice, it would be better to have two phones. Here’s why.
1. Keeping Business And Personal Lives Separate
As illustrated above, it can be quite complicated keeping your private and work lives separate so a second phone number would do well.
While you can assign each number with its own ringtone, those constant calls can drive you mad.
Also, you’d need a phone with two sim cards in most cases, so that wouldn’t work as well for you as having one phone you can leave behind.
Also, you might want to consider the benefits of having two networks to compensate for those dead spots when traveling.
Yes, you probably could set one phone number to a silent ring and one to your personal ringtone if you truly wanted to take personal calls.
However, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a bit of privacy on your date night with the wife?
Don’t tell us you wouldn’t be tempted to pick up that phone every so often throughout dinner to see if you’ve missed any important client calls, for example.
Leave that second phone in the glove box of the car if you are that anxious.
You can simply look for missed calls when the valet drives your car up for you!
Keep the personal phone on your person (hence personal phone) and your business phone in the office (did we really say that just now?).
2. Two Phones For Added Security
Bear in mind that if one sim card gets hacked, both accounts can be breached at the very same time if you are using one phone with two sim (network) cards.
Imagine your work sim being breached, also revealing all your personal financial data and vice versa.
It really does pay to have two separate phones for just this reason. And, that second phone can be a really good one at a significantly lower price if you know how to shop for unlocked phones.
Then, you can get a cheap monthly plan to use on your personal phone that you don’t often use anyway while saving your office phone for work related calls.
3. Safer Online Shopping And Bill Payments
Once again, it really is always about data breaches and if you often make online purchases or pay bills through an ACH payment option, then you wouldn’t want to have your work and client info breached if a hacker got hold of your personal phone number.
It can’t be said often enough that it is extremely important to keep work and personal numbers separate so that both won’t be at risk if just one number is hacked.
Also as mentioned above, two separate phones could give you two different networks to avoid dead zones while also interfering with a hacker’s devious plan!
Two phones, each with a separate number, and ideally different carriers, but two numbers at the very least.
To do anything else would be to deny yourself a private life, or conversely, leave your business open to being hacked. Neither is acceptable so get that second phone.
You’ll be happy you did. Now that we have that settled, go back to dinner where your wife is patiently waiting for you to rejoin the conversation.
