I can understand that… That was basically my setup as well (and also my current setup to an extent). I generally grouped both “work work” and “hobby work” together in the same room, though I do understand the appeal of wanting even greater separation.
Now, though, I don’t get a work-issued laptop, so I VPN from my own PC to work from home, which leaves things kinda moot as I don’t want to pay for a separate PC setup just to work remotely.
I don’t have enough physical space to separate work and home stuff at home. But no matter what I always separate work and personal technology. I currently have no work things on my phone except the Slack app is logged into the work slack (no notifications). The only personal things I do on my work PC is go to things like my email and this forum in chrome, but only when I’m in the office and don’t have a second computer on hand.
Other than that, complete separation.
When I was audited by the tax office, I had to show that my work space studio was a completely different part of my apartment than the living part of my apartment. They actually sent out someone to visit to check it all. What a ball ache.
Still, being able to claim 65% of my rent against tax was super handy. Now I have to pay tax on way more income not living in a commercial property.
I try to do that as much as I can, although I do have work stuff on my phone. However, I use Outlook for work email and the GMail client for personal stuff to try to get some sort of separation. Slack being, well, Slack, it all kinda gets lumped together in there.
US tax regulations are similar and my accountant warned me and my then wife about it when we tried to take a home office deduction. We didn’t get a visit, but did get warned that we may be audited as that’s apparently the #1 cause of tax audits in the US.
Yeah. That’s a key thing to have separate work space. That’s why Jeremy and I moved into a 3 bedroom because we knew I’d be working from home. We have a bedroom and our own separate computer rooms where my computer room is fairly spacious and has two desks.
Also, I do not claim any WAH stuff on taxes. As a federal employee, our returns get scrutinized more than regular citizens, so I don’t bother with itemized deductions. We hire a lot of ex-IRS employees, so they tend to give me solid advice, plus our taxes aren’t complicated.
Another why companies can’t always send people to work from home is security. Sure they can implement tons of security systems but people are dumb and/or untrustworthy. If they are in a building at least there’s some control over the data. Once you’re sending classified material off into the wild all bets are off. Also sometimes there are like, marked secret physical documents to review… Blueprints or something like that. they certainly don’t want you taking them out of the secured area.
Also there’s times in my specific job where I need to go to the production floor or down into boats in the yard to measure things quite often.
I’m not defending wanting to work in an office. I’m super pro working from home. But I can see why my job won’t let us work from home at all.
This is a fact. When I worked for a broker dealer, I could work from home… but.
I couldn’t use my own PC. I had to use a company laptop that connected via an RSA VPN with 2FA. I couldn’t use my own phone: I had to use a company VPN phone that I left on my desk at home. I could not print anything (even to a local printer), nor could I access my local network from the company laptop.
I also couldn’t get access to my Bloomberg Terminal, which meant certain parts of my day-to-day work were unavailable to me.
It was a lot of overhead, so only select employees were allowed to work remotely.
Benevolent dictatorship/cabal is the only way to run smaller organizations. My wife leads our MMO guild this way after she executed a coup of the (stupid) elected leadership. Literally every member is far happier now.