3 Tech New Year’s Resolutions That Will Save You Time And Headaches!

Most of us spend a good portion of our days in front of a computer for work or school. A lot of us will also spend an annoying amount of time each day trying to remember passwords, alt-tabbing between a million windows, and searching for that one email that needed answering. Here at Dynadot, we feel your pain (some of our desktops look like a Mondrian painting), and to kick off the New Year we've created three tech New Year's resolutions that are sure to increase your productivity and save you some head scratching!

Manage Those Passwords

Don't remember the password to that social account you only use once a month? Maybe your favorite food has changed since you last triggered a password reset and "pizza" has let you down for the first time ever? Password management can be an absolute pain when the average American has 26 different online accounts. Add to the fact that password exhaustion can mean that a person may only use a handful of passwords across dozens of accounts, and you've got potential security issues coupled with time-wasting password retrieval.

Well luckily there are services available that help streamline the management of your password portfolio. Products such as KeePass and LastPass allow you to store passwords in a secure online storage cloud. You can also organize passwords by type, save form fill information and upload secure documentation, which is all protected by one secure master password. Essentially, not unlike Lord of the Rings, you'll have one key to rule them all.

Email Alternatives

What's the first thing you do when you return to work from holidays? Check your emails, see that there are a million in queue, and then get up and get another coffee. Email management can be a big part of the workday, with the average office worker spending a whopping 28% of their day reading and writing emails. Some great ways to cut down time on email may be about not using it at all! Messaging apps such as Slack (full disclosure: we are Slack obsessed here at Dynadot) can help get questions answered quickly, and can keep conversations neatly filed away in topic channels. Social media can also be a good alternative to email. Nearly everyone in the world has a Facebook and/or Twitter account. Sending a quick DM or Facebook Message can not only alleviate some of the stress on email inboxes, but may yield a faster response. Finally, and this may seem weird in a "tech" New Year's resolutions list, but maybe some emails don't need to be emails. A brief stand-up meeting in an office can help solve issues quickly and promotes a collaborative working environment. Bonus of a stand-up meeting: You're standing up at this point and are one step closer to the coffee machine.

Tab Mania!

Multi-tasking through multiple windows and programs not only clutters up your desktop, but also your mind. I recently noticed that I still had a Safari tab open from weeks prior. The question long answered and the project long done, it was just taking up valuable real estate on my desktop.

Fortunately, there are some easy ways to de-clutter and manage your desktop. Relevance is a smart tab organizer plug-in for Chrome that neatly sorts your tabs based on the duration of viewing combined with the total time you browse pages on that website. Another trick is to get re-acquainted with old friends bookmarks and favorites. Whatever your browser calls them, these filing utilities are an ideal way to keep track of those online articles that you swear you'll get to right away.

And finally, it stands reason to believe that if you haven't used an open tab in three weeks, you're probably safe to go ahead and close it. Don't worry, it'll be okay.

Post by Barry Coughlan