How to Use Your Old iPhone to Set Better Work Boundaries

A new Apple ID could be your key to Zen

Nick Wolny
Debugger
Published in
7 min readJan 11, 2021

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Close up shot of a person holding up an iPhone 7 Plus and pressing the home button
Photo: Mia Baker/Unsplash

I scooped up the iPhone 12 Mini — my first upgrade in more than four years — mainly because it was time for an intervention. Working for yourself certainly has its perks, but quarantine has only accelerated my bad habits: checking work apps while sitting on the couch, peeking at metrics between social media scrolls, and pulling up marketing reports out of sheer boredom. Sometimes a needle has moved, and in my app-checking compulsion, I’ve dug myself into my own special variable rewards hole. Upgrading presented a good opportunity for a hard reset.

I didn’t know if my solution was the most optimal solution. What I did know was that I wanted a visceral change, one that I could literally feel in the palm of my hand and then put away in a drawer when it was time to call it a day. So, rather than writing the definitive, be-all-end-all tutorial on work-life separation, allow me to present how I reorganized my personal tech setup and what steps to take so you can do the same.

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What to consider before making your decision

My freelancing business involves a lot of content creation, and I regularly capture screenshots or complete tasks from my smartphone. I also like getting away from my desk sometimes; if editing articles from my phone while sitting in the backyard with an IPA is wrong, I don’t want to be right. That being said, the device designed to bring me pleasure had become a ticking time bomb of work updates. Having a smartphone as a work tool felt like a necessity, so converting my old iPhone 7 Plus into a work-only device seemed like the right solution.

Working for yourself certainly has its perks, but quarantine has only accelerated my bad habits.

Apple fans have been complaining for years that if you have more than one iCloud account, you can’t share certain files, in-app purchases, or subscriptions among the different devices in your “family,” and you have to repurchase them. Apple…

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Nick Wolny
Debugger

Editor, journalist, consultant. Current: CNET, Out Magazine. Owner, Hefty Media Group, a marketing consultancy. 🏳️‍🌈. LA. nickwolny.com | heftymediagroup.com