A long time ago in a galaxy far far away ... OK, so maybe not necessarily that long ago and certainly not that far away, when work started to intrude on my personal love for computers, I made sure I had a separate machine for personal use (a desktop in those days) and one (or more) for work. That was fine for a while, but eventually it became too much of a hassle to synchronise email, source code etc. Plus, in those days there was very little distinction between my personal (for pleasure) efforts and my work. So multiple machines gave way to one machine. I also tried this with mobile phones (with one for personal use and one for work), but with much the same conclusion.
This situation existed for the best part of a decade and a half. However, in the past year I've been finding that work is intruding more and more on my leisure efforts around computing. Whether those are writing research papers or just playing around with new languages, I find it is harder to stop work (via email, IRC etc.) from distracting me. And the phone just makes it worse!
So recently I've reverted to the way things I used to do things, with a dedicated work machine that knows only about work related "stuff" (including email) and a dedicated personal machine, that knows nothing about work (and its emails). The phone problem is about to be fixed with a similar strategy. I wonder how long I'll be able to keep up this separation of concerns. But I'm looking forward to trying!
And make sure you've got a firewall in your brain (the corpus callosum works well) across which company and personal ideas cannot transfer or worse, mingle and reproduce :-).
ReplyDeleteLet me know how such separation of concerns works!! My wife will be grateful! ;) I'm still doing the old way, well half of it: single PC, two phones. The two phones arrangement works well, as long as you do not mess switching work and personal contacts.....as I once did with my boss!! :(
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