Snippet: Should I Use My Personal Laptop for Work? ☇

David Murphy for Lifehacker (via Ben Brooks):

You mention at the end of your email that you have the option to get a work-issued laptop. That might sound like an inconvenience at first, but it’s the perfect way to maintain church-and-state-like separation between your two lives. You’ll have to resist the urge to do little things for convenience, like setting up your personal Gmail account or your favorite messaging service on your work laptop. That will be annoying in some instances, but the privacy you’ll maintain is worth it. And if your personal laptop breaks for any reason, at least you’ll have a backup you can use for the basics: web searches, driving directions, a safe-for-work YouTube video to cheer you up, et cetera.

Going forward, a great way to get around this entire work/life balance issue is to tell your employer (or a future employer) that you have no technological resources whatsoever. Your smartphone? Doesn’t exist. You have a dumb T9 device. You laptop broke and you haven’t purchased a replacement. You’ve never owned a desktop PC.

Like many, I had fallen into the work-email-on-an-iPhone trap and other work-related things have creeped into personal devices for the sake of convenience. While the article also discusses the IT policy side of things, I’m one of the ones who would be enforcing that at my job, so the separation aspect applies more. As such, I’ve pulled back quite a bit and am looking at other ways to reduce the role my devices play in my day job. If you’ve let this happen, I highly recommend you reevaluate this, as well.