Separate Work and Play with User Identities

You’re no doubt aware of how easy it is to let work and play bleed into one another—especially if you use the same computer for both. Weblog Hack Your Day suggests a simple-yet-effective solution: Create distinct work/play computing boundaries with different user identities.

When I recently reinstalled Vista, I created three accounts. The one labeled “Daniel” is where I keep all my personal stuff, like photos, music and so on. The one labelled blog is where I manage everything related to my online stuff like posts, guest posts, other articles, website promotion and so on. The third is where I have all the stuff related to my dayjob.

Separate user accounts are available (and have been for years) on every modern operating system, so you can employ this tip no matter what you’re running, and compartmentalising your different hats in this way will ensure that work doesn’t interrupt your play when you’ve earned it and vice versa. The author does point out some disadvantages, though, so give the post a read and see if it’s a worthwhile idea for how you work. If you’ve already got your methods, let’s hear how you create balance between work and home in the comments.