Each week we are posting a one-minute-ish quick video tip on something useful and practical that you can apply right away! Shhh! This week we are discussing your passwords. (Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, and today’s Clutter Video Tip is about keeping passwords. So, here’s what you don’t want to do. You don’t want to keep your passwords on a sticky note on your monitor. First of all, very insecure for someone like the exterminator to come through and see that information. And secondly, you should be using more than one password, and this is not enough room to keep the information about all the different accounts you have in your life. So, let’s look at a few ways that you can keep these passwords more efficiently and securely.
A simple A – Z index card file is great. If you just want to track your accounts on lined index cards, you can have the name of the website or account at the top, and alphabetized by that first letter. Then you can have the user name and the password and any notes that you have about this account. So you can put dates there, you can put information about your account, representatives that you’ve spoken to, and when you update your passwords, like you should, you can change them, add them here, and then when this card gets too full, you just shred it and you start a whole new card.
Another non-electronic way to store your passwords is by using an old address book, or if you want something a little better, you can try the Internet password organizer that we sell on our website at clutterdiet.com/internetpasswordorganizer. (Update August, 2016: This product is no longer available, please contact us at service@clutterdiet.com for updated information.) It’s very similar to an address book in that it has the laminated index tabs that will take you right to the alphabetical section that you want. But it has, instead, the fields that you would expect for tracking passwords like “web page,” “user name,” and “password,” and so on. Now, we recommend that you fill this book out in pencil, because you should be changing your passwords regularly and when you do, you can just erase that and keep that really simple for yourself. And whether you use this book or a card file, you want to keep the labeling of it very nondescript. You don’t want to write “passwords” right across the front of it. I like that this is very unassuming and has a plain cover, because you want to think about the vulnerability of these items getting lost or stolen.
I really prefer keeping my passwords electronically, because then I have them with me securely wherever I go. For years I’ve used an application called “Splash ID” that syncs with my Smart Phone and is also available on my desktop of my computer, so I have only now one password to unlock all of the others. So remember, the most important password you want to secure is your e-mail password, because if someone has access to your e-mail, they can go click “forgot password” on all of your other accounts and get access to those too.
So if you like these tips, you can get more at our website at clutterdiet.com/freetips.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been looking for tips on how to remember or store passwords safely.
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Thanks, Lorie – love these short, snappy videos!
Don’t forget that in addition to storing passwords smartly, you need to choose secure letter combinations, too. My (old) email account was hacked last week because I had used a dictionary word which fell victim to what’s known as a ‘brute force’ attack. This is easy to avoid by changing a couple of characters: for example ‘organize’ becomes much more secure if you change it to ‘or&an1ze’.