A really good reason to get organized is to save time.
If you’re like most, you’ll spend about three weeks out of the year looking for misplaced items!
And think about your online life.
More and more of our lives involves online activities, and all of that requires passwords.
Tracking passwords is a royal pain in the booty, right?
It’s pretty much impossible to have a unique and safe password for every site that you can remember.
And that means times spent resetting forgotten passwords!
But even worse, what if any of your accounts get hacked?
That’ll mean even more time wasted trying to clean up the mess the hackers make!
So, how in the world to organize passwords?
Option 1: Go old school
Grab a sheet of paper and make three columns: Website, User Name and Password.
Fill in your log as you go.
Pros: Not hackable, low cost and simple.
Cons: Can be misplaced or stolen, and maybe it is a little impractical to tote around the list all the time.
Prefer a done for your option?
Get this Password Organizer.
This is the system I use with my family.
And as my kids have gotten older, I’ve trained them to use it too.
They know whereto password organizer lives and regularly consult it (instead of me!) to get their passwords- huzzah!
A genius time saver on so many different fronts!
Option 2: Go digital
Digitize your old school list and make an Excel spreadsheet of your login information.
Pros: You could store the spreadsheet in the cloud making for easy access.
Easy to update and keep track of changes.
Cons: Can be hacked pretty easily and not very secure.
Don’t think that you can just change the extension of the document from .xls to .doc.
Hackers have programs that can sniff changes out faster than a pig hunting for truffles.
Again, not a recommended solution.
Option 3: Turn it on
Use the tools already baked into your phone to keep track of passwords.
For Apple users, embrace Key Chain, and let Apple suggest ultra secure (i.e. you’ll never remember the chain of random letters and numbers on your own!).
Pros: It’s a free program, backed by Apple.
Cons: Its only available for Apple products.
Option 4: Get a Password Manager
Don’t have an Apple product?
Find a password management program like LastPass.
I used this program before Key Chain came out and was pretty satisfied.
Pros: You only have to remember one master password and its available for all platforms
Cons: You’re outta luck if you forget the master password. Not free to use if you want to use Last Pass on mobile devices.
For even more options, check out this comparison of password managers by PC Magazine.
I highly suggest you choose this option if you don’t want to stick with an old school method of tracking passwords!
The Best Password
Another option to reduce the amount of time spent resetting forgotten passwords is to get mentally organized!
Establish a pattern to use for all passwords.
Here’s how!
Pick a good base password, then tweak it slightly to personalize the password for each site.
For example, take Catlvr123 as a base password.
For Google, the password could be CatlvrGgl123, Yahoo could be CatlvrYa123 and Amazon could be CatlvrAmz123.
Make the tweak something that makes sense to you and that’s easy to remember.
By repeating the base password, you’ll only have to remember how you tweaked the password for each website.
Use numbers, symbols and different capitalization styles to make your password strong.
Over to you!
Now you have some really easy ways to organize passwords – some bad and some good, but you have the straight dish from this tech geek.
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