WAYS TO BALANCE WORK AND PLAY ON YOUR PC

The lines separating work and play are blurrier than ever. We check up on Facebook friends while at work and edit work documents at home. This increases the risk of sharing your household finances spreadsheet at a big budget meeting or—heaven forbid—inviting the wrong Scott to your beer-brewing bash.

Here are five easy ways to organize your work and personal digital lives while using the same Lenovo system for both.

1. Customize Your Start Screen

When it comes to organizing, the Start screen is one of Windows 8.1’s greatest features.  You can pin your most-used apps, move and resize tiles and create groups to separate the things you need for work from the apps you access for recreation.
Once you’ve pinned an app to the Start screen, simply press and hold it to resize or move it around. To move a group of tiles, first use two fingers to “pinch” the Start screen and zoom out. Then press or click and drag the group of tiles to where you want it positioned. When you’re done moving groups, tap or click anywhere on the screen to zoom back in.

2. Use Multiple Cloud Storage Accounts

If you’re like most Lenovo users, you probably have accounts with various services like Google Drive, Box and OneDrive. But are you making efficient use of your cloud storage?
One easy way to maximize these accounts is to dedicate each one to a separate purpose: Google Drive for collaborating on work documents, Dropbox for storing and sharing family photos and so on. With Lenovo REACHit, you can easily find and edit documents no matter where they are.

3. Create Separate Windows User Accounts

If you really need a technique to stay on task or clearly compartmentalize work and play, you can create separate Microsoft user accounts—one for work and another for your personal life.
To add a second account to your Windows 8.1 PC, go to Settings > Change PC Settings > Other accounts > Add an account. Once you’ve added a new user account, you can switch back and forth by clicking or tapping on your photo in the upper right-hand corner of the Start screen.
You can now customize a Start screen for each account. So when it’s time to edit an Excel spreadsheet for your boss, log in to your work account for quick access and a distraction-free environment. Then, when you’re relaxing on the couch, switch over to your personal account to pull up a recipe for dinner.

Feeding all your email and contacts into one account is a convenience—until you’re in a hurry. Then it becomes surprisingly easy to send email to an unintended recipient. (Gmail auto-complete is notorious for this). One way to solve this problem is to use two separate email apps. You might choose to use the Windows Mail, Calendar and People app (see #8 in this article) for work and a personal Google account for all other emails and contacts.

5. Use Different Browsers

Don’t want to create multiple user accounts? Another option is to use different browsers. For example, you could customize Internet Explorer bookmarks based on work needs and Chrome apps for personal hobbies. It’s not as comprehensive as other alternatives but can be handy once you get in the habit of “living” in a certain browser depending on the tasks at hand.

Looking for more ways to organize your digital life? You can always separate work and play on multiple PCs and learn how to control them remotely.