Your Monthly Digital Diagnostic

Start your Digital Self-Diagnostic!

Hi fellow Digital Dejunkers! It’s Dave. We are stepping into a new decade and have an opportunity to make it our best digital decade ever.

Despite the ever-increasing digital influences, we retain absolute control over the one thing that really matters; our own digital behaviors.

As we build our positive digital habits, we need to remember to be completing several key steps every single month. The earlier, the better in most cases.

This won’t take too long, and it will set the tone for the rest of our digital behaviors this month, ensuring that we are digitizing deliberately!

MONTHLY DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC:

Update my passwords!

In the modern digital era, simply having a complex password is not enough to stop bad-actors from doing everything in their power to steal your money, data, identity, and anything else not strongly protected. Building some simple password habits will help us keep them far from the important things that make up our digital lives.

1. Update your passwords at least monthly. The longer a password remains the same, the more likely it is to be compromised. Although this sometimes happens with a criminal guessing your password or cracking it with software, you’re much more likely to see your information compromised by what should have been a trustworthy source. Can you say, “Credit Bureau?”
2. Keep your password easy to remember. Try a memorable sequence such as your initials to incorporate multiple words while keeping it easy to remember. Jane Mary Smith might incorporate the words Juliet, Montague, and Sleep for this month’s password given her penchant for romantic classics.
3. Make sure you also include numbers and symbols while staying compliant with your service provider’s guidelines. Some characters are fairly widely accepted &@! whereas others are widely frowned upon since they can mess with a website or application’s coding. %|`~ To keep things simple, use the symbols in a way that you will remember like substituting them for memorable letters.
4. Lastly, break up your words using a mixture of Capital and loWerCasE letters. While some password crackers can use brute force combination software to eventually crack your password over time, the typical hacker or criminal will be hard-pressed to guess your account’s password if you utilize these practices.
5. No password is ever foolproof, so watch those critical notifications from your service providers! If you learn of a breach that may have compromised your password or other information, change the password as soon as possible to limit your exposure and liability.
6. One more thing. STOP REUSING PASSWORDS! The single biggest risk to you when your login information is compromised lies in the likelihood that you have used the same login information all over the place. When you do, a single compromised password can grant the criminal access to your bank account information, medical information, employment information, retirement accounts, mortgage, and utility information, …. you get the picture. Practice good password behavior and make sure you have different passwords for your various accounts, further protecting your essential digital data and peace of mind.

Backup my data!

We’ve all seen it happen, either to ourselves or someone close.

With a project nearly done, a deadline at hand, or some irreplaceable item on the line, the device decides to take the precious item with it as it dies some horrid death. And all too often, that data can be unrecoverable whether from hardware failure, data corruption, or just terrible luck.

The ready fix for this is to keep your data backed up! Although this should be a regular part of your digital routine, it needs to be looked at intentionally at least once a month. Options for a data backup include:

1. Cloud backups. Many users are turning to cloud services like Google’s online storage or Carbonite for protecting their critical files. These services generally involve a monthly or annual fee, but they allow real-time data backups, and often remote access to your data from most of your devices.
2. External backups. For those of us who lived through the ’90s and watched hard drives increase in size at an exponential rate, a One Terabyte hard drive still seemed insane. Today, such drives are widely available and insanely affordable. With most of them easily compatible with your devices via USB or wireless, these offer a good additional option for peace of mind. As with all physical items containing sensitive or important information, make sure it is password protected, or locked in your safe away from prying eyes and old-fashioned smash and grab thieves.
3. Physical backups. Just like those ancestors of ours that kept cash in their walls and mattresses, sometimes a little physical security can make up for a ton of electronic heartache. Simple, inexpensive steps like having a printout of usernames, passwords, and account numbers for your most critical information can prove monumental, especially when someone dies unexpectedly or is otherwise unable to help grant access in a crisis. Printouts, like hard drives and important documents such as social security cards, birth certificates, and diplomas or transcripts must be protected to prevent identity theft, fraud, or other crimes. Consider investing in a fire-safe, and bolting it in a secure area of your living space where it is most likely to survive any catastrophic event like a fire or flood.
4. No method of backup is 100% effective, but none of them work unless you do. Take the opportunity now (or designate a time) to perform your monthly backup and protect your critical information.

Update my software!

“There is a new update available. Would you like to install it now?”

How many times have we seen these notices and delayed action, certain we will get around to it, but then we don’t? Software developers, device manufacturers, and service providers all routinely examine their offerings for vulnerabilities, then take action to fix them so that we can rest certain of the safety of our information we entrust to them. None of them are 100% effective (latest data breach anyone?), but their work on updates only work if we do too. Take a moment to update any software updates you already know you have put off over the last month, so you can have the fullest protection possible while living your digital life. The next time you see a pop-up, instead of saying, “remind me later”, do it immediately or set a specific time so that the update can be completed and protect you.

Run my virus scan!

Besides the failure of a hard drive, data breach notification, or bank fraud phone calls, virus warnings are some of the most terrifying notices we can get while operating so heavily in the digital world. With our dependence on devices at work, school, and home, a single virus can have a disproportionate effect on our world. Remember the following:

1. Install and use a good virus scanner to ensure safety while working electronically.
2. Set your scanner for automatic virus scans, limiting the likelihood that you will forget to do a scan and then be exposed to the latest virus. Check now for when your next scan will run, and do a scan if nothing is scheduled.
3. Update your virus scanner to ensure you are protected from the latest electronic threats. The staff at your provider work hard on this so that you don’t have to!
4. Ensure you have antivirus protection on ALL your devices.

If you do nothing else, the steps listed previously will significantly improve your digital protections this month. Make sure to do them now, or designate a specific time to do them.

If you have additional time, consider doing the following:

Check my notifications!

One of the leading productivity killers at work and at home is distractions, especially via notifications. Consider limiting or disabling the notifications on your devices, protecting your time and interactions with coworkers, family, and friends from frequent intrusions.

Read through any Identity Theft notifications.

Zander ID theft is the provider I go through, and they are great about letting me know when any of my (or my family’s) information turns up on the dark web. And it does happen. The number of data breaches continues to rise, with the impacts extending as high as one of the three American credit bureaus responsible for housing data critical in lending determinations.

If you don’t already have identity theft protection, get it now. The protection should be in place before a breach rather than after to ensure the greatest protection (think medical pre-existing conditions). If you can’t set it up now, designate a deadline to get yours in place soon.

Once you do have it in place, make sure to read through any notifications you receive. These clue you in to the breaches you need to be aware of, and get you started if there’s a particular risk that might be mitigated before it gets bad. This is a great service for your kids or older dependent family members too!

H and R Block ID theft scans. Tax season is coming up as well and tax fraud is yet another hugely important liability many of us face. Consider signing up for protections via your tax provider if they offer it, but also make sure to actually go in each month and look at any notices they send your way. Warnings and notices are only effective if we choose to heed them deliberately.

Unfollow the unhelpful.

While most of us are present on social media to varying degrees, some of us are far more active than others. Data suggests that this increased digital interaction has a significant impact on both our emotional and mental well-being. Take a moment to examine your digital footprint and social followings. Nobody else is going to police your social feed for you, so it is crucial that you be proactive in keeping it a healthy place for you to be interacting. As you view your social feeds, ask yourself if the material is:

1. Educational? If you are learning things you genuinely want to learn and that improves your situation, hang onto that source.
2. Motivational? When the material helps you move toward a particular goal, it is probably okay to keep around.
3. Inspirational? The ability of us to inspire each other to great action for the right reasons is one of the great hopes that launched Social Media feeds in the first place and continues to generate enormous positivity and helpful actions.
4. Necessary? If the material being shared is necessary for you to do what you do, whether that be work, providing care, or something else, it is okay to keep it, but try to do so only as long as it remains necessary.
5. Otherwise… if the material is not a positive element of your social world, give yourself permission to mute it or remove it depending on your personal evaluation. When in doubt, ask someone you trust to help weigh in and work through the question.

Unsubscribe from the unnecessary.

Lastly, give yourself the gift of less digital intrusions this month. When you see digital materials come your way, either through social sources, email, phone calls, or other methods, practice saying, “No” to things you don’t have a specific intention to follow through on. Keep the things that help you grow, mature, and shine, but accept that it is okay to let things go as well.

That’s it!

If you have taken these steps, you have accomplished a Monthly Digital Diagnostic and you are now much better situated than you would’ve otherwise been in your digital life. Think of it as a Digital Checkup where you are the Doctor, and in complete control of your future digital health.

Always remember to Digitize Deliberately!

Let me know in the comments below (or email Feedback@DigitalDejunking.com) if there’s an essential part of your Monthly Digital Diagnostic you find particularly helpful, or that I might have forgotten to include. I’d also love to hear more about the digital dilemmas you are currently overcoming.

To your Digital Health!

Digital Dave