When the chief executive lines up framed photographs of his wife and children across his desk everyone comments on what a great family guy he is. But when you place snaps of your kiddies around your terminal they wonder if your heart is really in your job.

You spend so much time at work that you might think it would be nice to personalise the space. Don’t — remember that office life is a battle of wits and wills between you and your employer. Show off personal things and you are giving the boss important strategic information.

Here are some things you think when you put the pictures up: “Isn’t that milk tooth cute!”; “Sexy six-pack!”; “Fluffy is the funniest moggie in the world!” Here are some things the boss thinks: “What an ugly baby”; “That's her husband?”; “Uh oh... she keeps cats.”

Why let such thoughts intrude in an office that otherwise sees you as a dynamic force? It is not as though you are going to forget what the baby looks like. Or the boyfriend. Or the cat.

Those personal professions encourage your boss and colleagues to think of you in an unprofessional way. They provoke other unhelpful reactions. At one extreme, they suggest that your mind is really elsewhere; at the other, they suggest that you have become so beholden to the office that you have started to make it a second home. Neither is attractive.

Bosses want employees to concentrate. They don’t want them to love the office to the point of neurosis. Make it a matter of pride that the office is somewhere you come to work, and your home is somewhere different.

Unconvinced? Here are two other reasons to heed this advice. How will you feel the day that you walk in to find your colleagues staging an impromptu drama with the pictures of your family — with the cocky boy from sales providing voiceover for Fluffy? And is there anything as sad as watching a newly sacked colleague load a crateful of personal possessions into a plastic bag?

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