Prep your tech for the New Year with these 5 tips

It’s a New Year, so how about we get you ready for it? Starting with your technology.

Here are a few quick tips to get you and your tech up-to-speed for the coming year.

Clean out your inbox.

Whether it’s your personal inbox or your professional one, there’s no better time than the present to clean it out and get it organized. Go through all those emails that have been sitting in your inbox for months, and do whatever you need to do to check them off your to-do list. Set aside some time for later that can be dedicated to each email and get a handle over your inbox.

Also, take this opportunity to ensure your folders actually make sense. Do you still need them all? Are they labeled correctly and do they accomplish what you need them to accomplish?

And lastly, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. For the next week or so, take any email you get that you no longer want to get and unsubscribe from it. Do this for just one week and it will have a significant impact on your productivity inside your inbox.

Go through all those photos.

It’s probably safe to assume that you have over a thousand photos stored on your phone. It’s pretty normal at this point. However, this can affect that whole having-storage-on-your-phone thing. This being said, take an hour or so to go through your photos. Delete all those repeat shots and keep only the best photos.

After you’ve done this, consider uploading your photos into the cloud and off of your phone. A good app to consider is Google Photos. You can organize your photos with ease, search by tags or dates, and benefit from unlimited storage.

Delete unused apps.

Did you download an app eight months ago, use it once, and then forget it ever existed? Most likely. And if you’re anything like everyone else, then you’ve done this multiple times, which means your phone is probably littered with a handful of unused apps. So… deal with it.

Take a few moments, swipe through each screen, and delete any app you haven’t used within the last month. And if there is an app on there that you feel you might use at some point in the future, delete it. When the time comes, you can download it again.

And then delete it again.

Change all your passwords.

Passwords. It’s time to change them. Odds are you haven’t done so in a while, and if you have, it was because you forgot your login credentials and the website made you do it. Because of this, there’s likely to be no consistent strategy to your online passwords.

Go through each of your accounts, update your information (like phone number and security questions), and change your passwords. If you can, create passphrases and include capital letters and characters.

Organize your digital filing system.

This one might take a little longer – depending on if you’re looking at your home PC or your work PC – but your files should all belong somewhere and your folders should all make sense to your personal productivity and daily workflow. So, your documents might be filed away in the appropriate places, but does this actually do anything for your productivity? If not, take the opportunity to adjust how you organize your files. Analyze and restructure.