Here's how you can balance personal hobbies and interests while excelling in your brand strategist career.

I establish clear boundaries between work and personal time. For instance, designate specific hours for work and make a commitment to not check emails or take work calls during your personal time. This help me have dedicated moments to unwind and pursue activities that help me be more creative at work.

This can be a little tricky today. Because most of us are carrying around our business phone in our pockets in our personal lives. But you have to set boundaries. You can't be available and thinking about work every waking moment. You will burn out. Luckily, whether it's your computer or your phone or your tablet most of our devices have settings where you can turn off or silence work tasks and phone calls and texts, but even email when you're not working. Use the settings!

I use effective time management techniques like the Pomodoro Technique or time blocking. Schedule your day in such a way that you allocate time for both work tasks and personal interests.

Time management? There's hundreds of books written on time management. And almost all apply to brand strategist. So the one thing I'll cover here, is stop the distractions during work hours. Make work time just for work and personal time for personal interests. For instance, if your marketing of social media, don't scroll your feed, and be distracted by all these things that people are marketing to you. Stay focused. Get on social, then get off. If you feel as though you can't stop being distracted, then Break every hour you work into a 5010 split. Work intently and focused for 50 minutes. At 50 minutes get up and go do something personal - away from your desk for 10 minutes. Repeat all day. You'll get tons accomplished.

Your personal brand is a curated amalgamation of your interests, passions, and experiences. These should all be leveraged into your unique POV regarding brand strategy - particularly positioning exercises and divergent skills sets blended as a means of creative output and insights. It also allows you to bring enhanced levels of authenticity to your work and role, because you aren't hiding a part of yourself out of embarrassment or shame. If you were once a stone mason (personal antidote), how does that craft or production color your approach to project scope or audience? Seems it could shed light on particular emotional context as well as streamline efficiencies in the creative process...

Find ways to integrate your personal interests into your career. For example, if you love reading brand stories and studying successful marketing campaigns, consider it part of your professional development. Choose books and articles related to branding and marketing, making your hobby a valuable asset for your career growth.

Depending on where you are in your life, your health may or may not be a concern. When you're 22 and healthy. They won't take much effort to stay that way. But as you age, as you sit behind a desk for hours and hours a day, this may change. You may find all sorts of health issues that pop up. I am 52. And if I could give you one piece of advice for your career, it would be: Make your health, the absolutely most important thing in your life and start on it as early as you can. You can always make more money. You can always find more time. But if you let your health go, you may never get it back. Aging, alone, he's going to change your health, so take care of it.

Engage with professionals who share your interests. This can lead to collaborations that blend your hobbies with your professional goals.

You know, all we've heard about for the last 10 or 15 years is follow your passion. Live your passion. Find something you're passionate about and make it your work. For a select this is possible. For the rest of us don't get lost in this trap. Instead, find what you're good at. Do that to the best of your ability. Become as good as you can at that thing. And guess what will happen? It will become your passion. Find what you're good at and do that. It's the best advice about work that I've ever been given.