This lesson is so hard to learn, and often learned too late. To help reinforce these points, I would like to share a story from my own military career:

A friend of mine told me this story, and it had a profound effect on my life. I only wish I had heard it earlier, as many of the traits of the subject of this story were traits that I would have used to describe myself during most of my time in the Navy.

Some explanation to front-load the story: In the Navy, only a few people get promoted to Chief Petty Officer (CPO). Of those, a handful get promoted to Senior Chief Petty Officer (SCPO), and an even smaller percentage of those go on to become Master Chief Petty Officers (MCPO). While commands generally have several CPOs, a few SCPOs, and might even have more than one MCPO (at a large command), there will only be one Command Master Chief. This individual is the senior advisor to the Commanding Officer and Executive Officer. Becoming a Command Master Chief or Senior Enlisted Advisor is a rare achievement, and does generally take extraordinary dedication to achieve. It's a high honor, only bestowed on a few. It takes a lot of ambition and hard work, and in an enterprise where you are often separated from your family,  arriving at even CPO or SCPO levels takes more of that sacrifice than many are willing to make. Please use this as context for the rest of the story...

One day, stopping into the Chief's Club at a Navy base, my friend happened to run into a senior enlisted person he had known from one of his earlier ships. My friend was surprised to see his friend in civilian clothes, because he remembered this individual as the "ultimate lifer," "haze-gray and underway" all the time (Navy for an exceptionally dedicated sailor). He struck up a conversation, and his friend told him he was not doing well. When my friend asked "Why?" he got the following reply:

"I spent my entire career trying to become a Command Master Chief. I took all the most demanding, arduous tours of duty I could, extended sea duty and rolled early from shore duty, volunteered for every challenging job I could find. I finally became a Command Master Chief, then rolled to another ship as their Command Master Chief. During that second tour, my wife came down with pancreatic cancer and was dead within three months. I had to take a humanitarian discharge so I could take care of my kids (both teenagers). Now I work at a civilian job where they don't even know what a Command Master Chief is. I can't control my kids...they don't listen to anything I say...they just say 'Who are you? We don't know you...for our entire lives you were just someone who came home every once in a while and spent some time with Mom. We don't have to listen to you.'"

Thank you Jesse, for a well written and easy to follow article on how to balance life and work.

As you said, with todays technology it is more imnportant than ever to deliniate between the two.

An exercise that I was taught to help seperate life and work is to watch my workplace get smaller and disappear in my rear view mirror as I drove away and concentrate on that visual as I cleared my mind to better help me be a part of my family.