In addition to venturing out of my cave for coffee, I also got a haircut today (productive, I know). The woman who cuts my hair got an iPhone for Christmas, and we were chatting about our experiences with and thoughts about it. She expressed some dismay that she had to switch from T-Mobile to AT&T to get the iPhone, since she liked T-Mobile better and was happier with her old tariff. We got to talking about unlocking iPhones and using them on T-Mobile, and she expressed some dismay that she hadn’t done that. I said I had, and it was great, you don’t miss much, just visual voicemail and (at least for me) the YouTube app.

Her: “You can’t use visual voicemail?”

Me: “No, but who cares, it’s just eye candy.”

Her: “Oh, forget it, I use that ALL the time, and it’s great.”

She went on to make the point that she uses her phone both in her professional and personal lives, and that the visual voicemail feature makes it easier to keep the two separate. For instance, she gets calls from clients about appointments, as well as calls from her friends and family. With visual voicemail, she can ignore the work-related calls and skip right to her friends’ messages, leaving the work stuff to deal with when she’s working (or vice versa).

I thought that was a pretty interesting insight, and I took a couple things away from the conversation. First, I probably need to do a better job of getting over my own hangups and biases when looking at stuff sometimes Second, there’s a real desire for mobile tools to help people manage their personal and professional lives, beyond carrying multiple phones or SIMs.

Things like BlackBerrys and other mobile data services, or even just mobile phones themselves have delivered a lot of benefits to the business world. But there’s a downside to being constantly connected to work: you’re constantly connected to work. And it’s not just salespeople, techies and lawyers — it’s all sorts of working people. As the mobile workstyle becomes more and more pervasive, the need for tools to help manage and control it — and keep it separate from people’s personal lives will only intensify.