As more and more people are enjoying flexi-time or working from home, the lines between our personal and work lives can start to become blurred. It can be complicated to balance the two, but there are some ways that you can handle this across your digital devices.
Build a digital wall on your work computer
While this idea may only apply to those with full administration rights on their work laptop, it’s a great tip to keep your work and personal life separated on your computer.
Simply make two partitions on your device – one for work, another for personal use. This is not only a help with maintaining a good work-life balance, but is also great for security.
There is no need to store all your personal passwords on the work computer, as they can be stored safely in your isolated personal partition. This can also help keep any work-related software out of the way.
As your partition will run on a separate operating system, you will not be forced to use specific browsers or stopped from updating applications at home – which is often the case with security conscious IT departments.
Separate your web browsers
If you don’t have admin access to your work laptop, or you find the idea of dividing your hard drive into two a little daunting, then there are other ways of creating a digital distinction between work and personal life.
One of the simplest ways to do this is by creating separate work and personal profiles on any applications you use, in particular your main web browser. This will keep you from getting distracted by any sites that you regularly visit in your free time – as all your bookmarks and passwords will be separated too.
Manage your mobile phone
If you are given a work phone, then obviously the easiest solution is to not use it for anything personal at all, though clearly this is not that practical.
A good idea will be to use a separate browser for any work and personal uses – for instance, only ever using Firefox for work and keeping Chrome for personal use only.
That way, nothing can synchronise without you being aware of it, and your personal emails or passwords cannot get mixed up with your work.
When in doubt, stay safe
Despite these clever workarounds and the ability to separate work and personal lives to an extent in our digital existence, it is always worth remembering that all the devices your workplace issues to you can easily be tracked and monitored.
The best advice is to simply never do anything on a work device that could potentially cost you your job. Browsers and apps have a habit of synchronising whenever they get the chance and any of your documents, emails or personal text messages could easily end up being saved on to the servers of your place of work.
More importantly than this, all your personal passwords and account details could easily go the same way. It is often much easier to simply keep your work devices strictly for work only.
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