Digital Worker Computer Hygiene: Separating the personal from the professional you

I have been working from home more and that has got me considering work/life balance and computer hygiene. Working from home tends to cause a melding of professional spaces with personal spaces and that can cause difficulty in separating the two. I use a personal device to access work tools and resources, and this results in numerous small little annoyances during the workday where one side interferes with the other. Distractions from personal correspondence would interrupt my attention during the workday, and a late email would derail a nice evening. I would run into annoyances regarding access to company documents on google drive and other SSO web apps when it resolved the wrong logged in user. As a software developer, I would also run into incompatibilities regarding tool settings and environments that work benefited from, but was different than my personal preference. To address these problems I created more distance between my professional and personal contexts by moving all work documents and logins to a separate OS user account on the same device. I found doing this way easier and beneficial than I initially expected and recommend you do the same if you use a personal computer for work and/or significant side-projects.

Work Boundaries

When your job has a significant amount of work-from-home involved, as many do in these times, keeping that healthy boundary between personal and work time can be difficult. You’re not going anywhere, probably not spending as much time on your appearance, or needing to maintain as rigid a schedule to handle the logistics of everyday life, so there is less pressure to stop working. There is also the issue of being too distracted at home as well. You may barely be able to put any time at work due to the rest of life demanding your attention. When working from home, more intentional techniques need to be used to maintain appropriate separation from work responsibilities.

Having a dedicated space and/or dedicated devices for work can help maintain that healthy separation of attention. However, there are many times when you can’t practically use that physical separation of personal concerns and professional ones. Many of us don’t have the luxury of a separate home office or company issued devices. If you’re self-employed, you are also your own company, which can lead to even fewer boundaries between work responsibilities and personal pursuits. You may also have multiple active side-projects and it would be impractical to keep a separate device for each of them.

When you need or want use one device, but need to keep work or project documents, tools, and context separate, what are some ways to keep things separated?

• login to a separate email address
• put files in a separate work specific sub folder
• configure environment contexts for each project
• Use a different browser for work/other projects, or use tab containers in browsers that support them, to not leak cookies or browsing history between personal and work contexts.

Keeping up with all this can be exhausting and the temptation is always there to let your personal identity mix with work or project identities. That can then lead to the problems discussed earlier with not having appropriate boundaries.

Create a Separate OS User Per Project

Luckily, there is a simple way that all modern general purpose operating systems support, Create a separate OS user account for work and major projects. OS user accounts are specifically designed to separate identities from each other on the same system. In this case it the same physical person, but “wearing different hats”. The benefits are surprisingly numerous.

• Files, tools, logins, project context are separated all automatically.
• Switching contexts becomes much more intentional, but still as easy as switching users.
• IT security is also easier because you can restrict your work personas to only have non-admin access
• Web Browser context is automatically maintained, unnecessary logging in or out of services needed, because you can only access them with this OS user.
• You can use the many OS integrated productivity software without needing to maintain separation or support multiple accounts.
• No alerts or notifications from services that don’t involve your current work context.
• When your personal user and work user are on the same machine, you can still allow some data overlap, but with even better controls. An example might be allowing your work user to have read-only access to your music library so you can still listen to music off-line.
• Freedom to customize your interface, controls, and tools for a single work context without fear of messing up or complicating others.
• When your employment status changes at work or move on from a side-project, you can easily cleanup and delete the user account and be done with it.

I’m surprised it took me so long to realize the benefits of having a separate user account for work when I use personal devices for work. I recently moved all work items to a separate user account and I noticed a significant productivity increase. No more micro-decisions on how to separate work items and personal items, fewer authentication and authorization hurdles, and fewer opportunities for personal correspondence to interrupt work. I could integrate my development environment settings with the operating system and know that any secrets that I maintained were enclaved, secured and encrypted in a non-admin account. There are so many subtle, every-day annoyances that are smoothed out when using a separate user account.

While I have numerous personal projects, I don’t see a need to create separate users for them yet. I think my point of departure would be when there is significant financial or legal responsibility tied to the project is when a separate user account and context should be used. Your mileage may vary, but I suggest considering the option in your own work.

Conclusion

To maintain productivity and work/life balance, we need to maintain separation of context between our work and the rest. Many people can and choose to use physical separations like offices, and dedicated work devices. Some don’t have the luxury of physical separation for a variety of reasons, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also create intentional space between there work, projects and their personal computing needs. When the need arises for a separation of context, I recommend creating a new operating system user and store that context there. I think it’s an under-utilized functionality that has helped me improve my productivity and keep my work/life balance in check.