In some ways, bringing your mobile phone to work with you can seem like a great idea, but unless you treat it with the proper degree of discretion, you risk wasting valuable time, annoying your colleagues, and making an unfavourable impression on your manager. If your friends and family can reach you at any point, no matter what you are doing, it can be difficult to focus on the task in hand.

In your leisure time, the choice of whether to have on your mobile phone or not is completely up to you. At work, however, you have to consider the people around you. Here are some rules that you ought to follow if you want to take your mobile phone at work.

Put your phone in Silent mode

If you feel you must take your mobile phone to work with you, make sure that none of your colleagues gets an opportunity to hear your ringer. If you need to be on call, leave it in front of you in silent mode, or put it in your pocket and set it to vibrate. Ringtones, especially comedy ones, can be highly annoying when you're trying to work. In addition, you don't especially desire your boss to be aware of how often you are getting called.

Only use your mobile phone for important calls

If you do have to use your mobile phone at your place of employment, you should just use it for calls of an urgent nature. The only calls you should consider to be important are serious family matters which require immediate attention, and calls related to the work you are doing. Anything of a social or frivolous nature should be left until after you have left work. You can always call them back after work if the situation requires it, and nobody will be offended that you didn't pick up while you were working.

Be sure to go somewhere private to make calls

While it's perfectly acceptable to use your mobile phone at work for calling people when you are on a break, it can pay to show a little consideration for your co-workers by finding a place to talk where your conversation can't be overheard, even if what you're discussing isn't of a particularly personal nature. Just because you're having a break doesn't mean that everyone else has to put up with your prattling on when they're trying to get their work done.

Don't Bring Your mobile phone into meetings

If you're at an important meeting, whatever you do, don't pick up on your mobile phone. In fact, don't even take it in with you, as it might distract yourself and others from the task in hand. Remember that previous generations did alright without any mobile phones at all!

Let Your mobile phone calls go to voicemail

Some networks offer special deals on voicemail services whereby you can pick up your voicemail for free, whereas some others don't, so it pays to check.

Rather than picking up the mobile phone to check if it is indeed an important matter that you're being called about, why not leave it alone and let the person leave an answer phone message, or send an SMS message. It will take far less time to check any messages that have been left than it will to answer the call and then explain to the caller that you can't talk.