Why I keep work on a separate phone

I do have Slack on my personal phone, but not for work.

We currently use Slack as a family, so removing the application altogether is not an option. The problem is that putting my family workspace and my work workspace side by side would make checking work almost irresistible.

I know myself. I would open Slack to read a message from my family, notice something in the work workspace and end up checking it too. Or I would pick up my phone to browse X, search for a new car I will never buy, or do something vaguely constructive, and somehow find myself back at work.

Even a thirty-second look can bring an unresolved problem or difficult conversation back into my head for the rest of the evening.

So work lives on a second phone.

I use a spare iPhone SE from 2020, which normally stays on the family charging station. During the day, I can carry it when I am away from my laptop. On the exceptional evening or weekend when something genuinely requires my attention, I can pick it up.

The important part is that work does not follow me by default.

As a cadre in France, my job is not really about clocking a fixed number of hours. It is about responsibilities and getting the work done. I accept that this occasionally requires flexibility. But flexibility should work both ways. Being able to respond when necessary does not mean carrying work everywhere, all the time.

Perhaps this comes more naturally to me because I spent most of the 2010s without a smartphone. I kept a BlackBerry for a couple of years until 2012, then did not own another smartphone until 2020, when I finally caved and bought a Moto G. I moved to Apple in August 2021 with an original 2015 iPhone SE.

For years, having the internet permanently in my pocket simply was not normal to me. I still do not believe every part of my life needs to share the same device.

The work phone is also genuinely useful for testing. I can install TestFlight builds, keep several browsers and accounts configured, and experiment without filling my personal phone with work applications, cookies and browsing history.

It reminds me of the device lab I was tasked to set up at FanDuel for frontend developers. I organised and kept a collection of both old and new phones and tablets, and it was always fun—and genuinely practical—to pick up a real device and see what the product actually felt like on it.

Simulators have their place, but they do not quite reproduce a slow phone, a small screen, an older specific browser or a device struggling under the weight of a modern application. You had to be there I guess.

Using an older phone is therefore a feature, not a compromise. My iPhone SE provides a decent approximation of the degraded experience some users will have. Performance problems and cramped interfaces are much harder to ignore on a six-year-old phone than on the latest flagship.

I do not pay for another SIM or mobile plan. When I need connectivity away from Wi-Fi, I tether it to my personal phone.

There is also a security benefit too. Most of the time, when I leave the house, company data and work accounts stay behind. Losing my personal phone would still be painful, but it would not also mean losing a device full of work applications.

I am not suggesting everyone needs two phones. For me, Focus modes and notification settings are too easy to override. They also cannot solve the fact that the same Slack application contains both my family and my colleagues.

A physical boundary works better.

When I leave the work phone on my desk, I have deliberately stopped working. Work remains available when it genuinely needs to be, but it doesn’t live in my pocket.