Happy New Year

Technology Resolutions for 2013

Now that we are coming to the end of the first full week of the New Year, I have time to consider my technology resolutions for 2013 – some of which were frantically made when the dreaded blue screen of death reared its ugly head on my personal laptop before I had a chance to backup 12 gB of recent photos as well as documents that had never been backed up.   Total devastation was avoided only because my son was visiting and able to use his SATA to copy data from our hard drive to his computer.  So here are my technology resolutions for 2013:

1. Back up computer hard drives so that in the event of a failure, it won’t take days to reinstall programs, anti-virus software and browser plugins. Check out this information about World Backup Day. 
2. Back up data, especially photos and important documents.  When an external hard drive isn’t available, back up to the Cloud (Skydrive, Google Docs/Drive, Drop Box, etc.) For $5.00/year you can add 20 gb of storage to your Google account.
3. Spend time regularly cleaning up files, particularly photos.  Redundancy can be a good thing, but multiple copies of files are just digital clutter that can add hours to a backup.
4.  Be discriminating with apps.  Everyone likes free stuff, but AppsGoneFree and AppShopper have made it entirely too easy to fill even a 32 gB iPad with unnecessary apps. And with iCloud enabled, most of those apps are automatically installed on the user’s iPhone as well. Who needs 18 photography apps? Yes, it’s easy to delete apps from a device, but they are still in your account and will need to be dealt with eventually.
5. Become proficient at using a few of the best programs, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile apps for specific purposes rather than knowing a little about many.
6. Change passwords particularly for sites that provide access to financial and other sensitive information. Even though I have been diligent in creating new strong passwords/phrases complete with capitals, symbols, upper and lowercase letters, there are probably 2-3 dozen sites that I haven’t used in quite a while where I wasn’t so diligent.
7. Work smarter. Set up email filters and rules to keep the inbox manageable. Use color-coding on calendars.  Before moving a message to a folder, determine if it is really needed.
8. Unsubscribe from newsletters, blogs, list serves, etc. that are no longer read.

If you have made technology resolutions for 2013, please let us know what they are in the Comment section.