I’ve been thinking for awhile about our need to separate our lives into separate “categories”. I don’t know if everybody does it, but I know I do it, and I’m not alone. The reason I think of this is because I just saw @mosaicteam say they started a twitter account for their web design company.

The first example that I keep thinking of is myself and my websites. I have joshbetz.com, which I’ve been running for a few years, previously betzster.no-ip.org. When I decided that running my own server out of my basement wasn’t cutting it anymore I went to GoDaddy. When I bought joshbetz.com, GoDaddy did what GoDaddy does and let me know that joshbetz.org, joshbetz.net, joshbetz.tv, joshbetz.anything, was available. Wow, I thought, I’ll get a few of them, originally planning to point them all at joshbetz.com. It wasn’t a couple of weeks before I had a plan for all of them. I could put my web design services on joshbetz.net, my projects on joshbetz.org, and keep my blog on joshbetz.com.

The same thing happens, and on a much bigger scale, on social networks. Twitter comes to mind. How many people have multiple twitter accounts? Now, you don’t have multiple twitter accounts, but there are a few people that do. But it’s just for organization and ease of use right? Maybe.

Leo Laporte has an account for himself and an account for TWiT. Maybe all of Leo’s followers don’t care when MacBreak Weakly is recording, or maybe that’s why they’re following him.

I know we (I) have a twitter account for TSE (in addition to @joshbetz), but I only have 5 updates in a month. We’re in development, do we need a twitter account? It’s not a huge project and nobody’s following TSE on twitter. As for my websites, it’s probably not bad to separate my personal blog from the web design stuff, but having the projects separate?

Like I said, people need to have separate categories for basic things. That’s why I have a homework category in Things. If all my to-dos were all sitting in the inbox all the time, maybe sorted by date, I would never know what needed to get done first. I obviously have to finish my homework before I work on TSE or write blog posts, but if I didn’t have categories I would spend much of my time deciding what to do first, completely negating the purpose of a to-do list in the first place. But what’s too much? A separate domain for your projects? A separate domain for each project?