A friend of mine recently left his employer to enjoy a gentle slide into retirement. He was a valued employee, respected by his clients, and his transition out was amicable and organised.
Until he realised that he had placed his entire online non-work life on his work-provided MacBook and iPhone.
Now he wasn’t running a side business so at least that complication didn’t arise. But the effort to re-home his email, financial records, contacts, files, photos, software and subscriptions was, to put it gently, complex and time-consuming.
Had he asked me years ago, I would have given him this advice: Keep your work life and personal life separate.
My friend had plenty of time to separate and extract his personal data. But...
Imagine he came into the office one morning to find that a restructure, disciplinary matter, policy, or unexpected acquisition had dropped a different PC on his desk?
And when they get the old one back, what would they find if they decided to forensically review its contents?
What if this happened to you? What would they find?
Your work computer
Ideally, nothing personal. Because you never used it to sync your personal email and calendar, store your photo albums and personal files, play your Spotify playlists, and check your social media accounts.
They find nothing personal because there’s nothing personal to find.
Keep your personal online life on your home computer, and your work life on your work computer. Don’t mix them, ever. Keep them separate.
Your work phone
Ditto for your work phone. Keep your personal phone (and phone number) completely separate. Even if they just give you a work SIM or eSIM, don’t multi-SIM your own phone. Go to Kmart, expense the cheapest smartphone you can find, and use that.
Don’t use your own phone. Even with two SIMs installed, your contact lists, WhatsApp, texts, social accounts, and emails just seem to blend together. If you ever have to walk away, nothing is compromised. And you keep your personal phone number.
Your side business
Every company handbook says, ‘separate your personal accounts from your work laptop.’ No surprises there, but things change when you have a side business.
If you’re reading an article like this one, there’s a chance you’re already doing it: working a job, and quietly building the thing that eventually replaces it. A consultancy. A product. A small store that’s starting to take real orders.
That’s not unusual. It’s how most people who go independent actually get there. Nobody leaps straight from employed to founder without a runway, and the runway usually gets built on the side, during the hours nobody’s watching.
It matters where you build it
Your employer looks at your laptop and sees the potential for repurposing their intellectual property. They see your side business files sitting alongside the company’s Salesforce login, and the AutoCAD drawings that have nothing to do with company work.
They see your Stripe invoices, your client emails, proposals and deliverables. They see all the details of your Shopify store, including the images you photoshopped using their Adobe account.
They see unequivocal proof you’re planning an exit. That’s not a good position to negotiate from.
Keeping it all separate
Your employer pays you a salary. In return, while you’re on the clock, your expertise, knowledge, credentials, insights, time, skills and network are available for the benefit of your employer. Not all of them all of the time, but they’re on call.
Your employer makes tools available to you to deliver these things. For most readers of The Banana Stand, this means a computer, a phone, software and apps. These remain your employer’s property, and most of what you do on them could become theirs too.
The moment your personal data crosses over, it stops being purely yours. You don’t control the device, the account, its administration, its retention policies or when access ends.
The safe approach is to keep your personal life off these devices entirely.
Build in the open, on your own ground
None of this is an argument against building something on the side while employed. If anything it’s the opposite. Most solo businesses start exactly this way, and there’s no shame in taking a salary while your own thing finds its feet.
The mistake, though, is building it somewhere you don’t fully control.
So build it on your own hardware. Your own accounts. Your own subscriptions, even the boring ones like image editing software, rather than borrowing the licence your employer already pays for. It costs a little more, a little earlier, than doing it the convenient way. That cost buys you something worth having: the ability to walk out on any given day, on any given terms, with nothing left behind that tells a story you didn’t choose to tell.
This isn’t about assuming the worst of your employer. Most people will never have their devices forensically reviewed, and most exits are as ordinary as they sound. It’s about not needing to gamble on which kind of exit you get.
So keep it clean and simple. Hold your employee, personal and side business lives apart while there’s still nothing at stake. Because when the day arrives that it suddenly could matter, it won’t.