How to Maintain the Digital Divide Between Home & Work

- Jill Duffy

Information workers (like me) often check work email on the weekend. Or they might make headway on an important presentation late at night from home, if that’s when their most productive hours are (or if they are running behind on a project). They are equally prone to answering personal messages while at work, or perhaps scanning a home insurance document on the office copier. If you fall into this category, chances are you probably like this flexibility. But if you’re not careful about how you separate your work and personal files, you could be getting yourself and your data into trouble.

Risky behaviors in the gray area between work and life can put sensitive data at risk. For instance, although you might scan a personal document at the office occasionally, you wouldn’t want to scan anything sensitive, because, unless you’re the head of IT, you have no idea where the multifunction printer saves copies of files it scans. They’re probably on the hard drive of the scanner itself, and they might be saved to unsecured shared servers, too.

Additionally, to maintain some semblance of work-life balance, it’s helpful to have cues that remind you when you’re doing one kind of work while you’re on the other clock. Let’s say you’re catching up on some emails three days into a family vacation. You might appreciate that you’re able to deal with any urgent problems that have arisen, but you might also want to get back to enjoying Splash Mountain with your kids. With a few simple strategies for separating your personal and work files, you’ll never get sucked into doing work for too long when you’re enjoying your personal time—and vice versa.

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