The new year often starts with unrealistic challenges, but there’s one thing you can do right now that will make the rest of the year easier. Organizing your online life will significantly improve your productivity, wellness, and overall safety.
After all, an average US adult spends more than 6 hours online daily, and it’s only natural to take care of your virtual environment. With the tips below, you will only have to spend an hour organizing your information. This way, you will find anything you need just within seconds. Let’s dive in!
Upgrade Your Browser
Your Web Browser is your gateway to the Internet. If you don’t take good care of it, it can quickly become cluttered with useless add-ons, incorrect passwords, an enormous cache, and other things that will slow it down.
Firstly, saving passwords in a browser environment is a bad idea. Web Browsers like Google Chrome were not developed as cybersecurity software, and even though they offer to save every password, it’s unsafe.
It’s much better to use a trusted password management browser extension that will secure your logins in an encrypted vault. It will autofill your passwords on demand and comment on its security so that you know where you need improvement. Most professional password managers offer extensions to popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Brave.
Another often disorganized practice is bookmarking. If you have ever marked an article to read later and forgot all about it, organizing your bookmarks will solve such issues. It’s best to create different folders sorted by topic. For example, separate movies and tv shows from work-related stuff. Create a dedicated folder for music and whatever else you are bookmarking. Following this logic will save you time whenever you need to look for something important.
Lastly, add Grammarly to your web browser if you’re big on online forums or any other written media. It will check your spelling in real time and fix the mistakes. It’s especially handy if you’re writing job-related emails that require correct spelling and punctuation. Even more so, you don’t have to go to online dictionaries to check every word!
Organizing Online Data and Accounts
Email is one of the most popular communication tools that can quickly become unbearably disarranged. There’s nothing worse than seeing thousands of unopened emails when looking for a specific letter.
Gmail is by far the most popular Email platform offering built-in organization tools. As with bookmarks, you can create separate thematic folders and forward emails accordingly. You can separate work-related stuff from study material and put correspondence with friends somewhere else.
Gmail offers 15GB of free storage space, but you must pay extra if you want more. Keeping high-definition photos in Google Drive will quickly fill in the limited space, and their plans aren’t the cheapest in the market. Instead, you can subscribe to a third-party dedicated Cloud storage service to store all your goods securely in an encrypted server.
Listen closely if you habitually store personal information online, such as personal photos or financial data. Using Cloud storage services to manage such data is advisable because it is accessible on any device connected to the Internet. You can quickly find a required invoice or a funny video, even if it is not saved on your device.
However, exposing such data to malicious actors can have dire consequences. Your Cloud storage service provider should accept files in an encrypted format, use the latest encryption algorithms to secure their servers, and offer additional features such as secure file sharing.
Lastly, it’s best to limit what you share on social media. Remember, everything that you post there – stays there. Of course, you can delete photos or posts, but you cannot be sure somebody else did not take a screenshot. What may look like a good or funny idea may look goofy after ten years.
Oversharing on social media can also reduce your online safety. Cybercriminals gather any publicly available personal data to use for targeted phishing accounts or guess the user’s passwords. If your pet’s name and birthday combination is your password, they can gather this information from your social media account and gain unauthorized access.
Conclusion
As simple as these steps may sound, they will significantly impact your daily routine. You will notice you spend less time looking for something and feel more productive once all your files are in place. More importantly, organized digital life is more secure, and our discussed tips provide comfort and online safety simultaneously!
