20 Ways To Get Your Tech Life Together in 2020
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It’s a new year and it’s not just any year - it’s 2020, which means that it’s the start of a new decade. With the turn of a decade comes the hopes, plans, and dreams for many people to be and do better.
In keeping with the optimistic outlook on life, the month of January is usually a great time for getting together with friends to create vision boards, set fitness goals, fast for clarity, and more. But what about your tech life? Making plans to clean up your tech tools is something that can be easily overlooked with the excitement of a new year. For many people, devices play a major part in everyday life so why not make plans to get that in order, too?
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It’s pretty obvious that there is nothing fun about sitting at a desk with a computer, laptop, tablet, and/ or cell phone, and trying to figure out where to start. And, there is certainly nothing exciting about turning on any one of those devices only to be met with the beeps, chirps, reminders, and icons about the things that you need to do. All of the noise and tasks can be overwhelming but if you come up with a plan, you will be positioning yourself to have your best tech life ever.
If organizing your electronics is not something that you look forward to doing, invite friends over to your home and make it a device cleanup party. Do you prefer to work alone? That’s fine. Set a date, make a music playlist, grab your headphones and commit to using that focused time for the project. My recommendation is simply that you make it fun and get it done.
Workday at a cafe
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For those of you who are not sure about what to clean, organize, or update on your devices, I have a few suggestions to help you get started. In no particular order, here are 20 things that you can do to get your tech life together 2020:
1. Apply software updates
To ensure that your system has the latest patches and fixes. Updates typically help with performance issues.
2. Review storage space
Do you have a preferred storage method? Tools like Google Drive and Dropbox are popular options.
3. Streamline/ Uninstall apps
Remove unused apps from your devices to free up space and to declutter your desktop or Home screens. If you have a Wallpaper in the background, you will be able to enjoy looking at it with fewer icons on your device.
4. Check battery life
Batteries are the lifelines for all devices. You know when it’s almost time to replace the battery because you will not get as much time out of using a device, or it takes longer to charge, or there is an indicator telling you that your battery life is low. Do a battery check on your computer, tablets and cell phones. (While you’re at it, check on the batteries of things around your home like remote controls, car keys, smoke detectors, and clocks. It can’t hurt.)
5. Sync devices
Make sure that all of your devices can connect and talk to each other. You can set up if your computer can be visible to others in your settings. By syncing devices, you make sure that you always have the latest version of a file at your reach.
6. Import/ Export photos
To create space on your device and to put the photos to use. Each year brings its own set of memories, make room to capture them.
7. Reset all passwords
It’s important to change your passwords often for security purposes. It’s not advised to use the same password for multiple applications, accounts, etc., because if you are ever hacked it will be easy for hackers to access multiple accounts.
8. Organize files
For Finder (MAC) or Windows Explorer (PC) having a solid organizational structure is crucial. It’s important to create a system for storing and easily retrieving your files. Do you need to send a large file to someone? YouSendIt and WeTransfer are popular filesharing tools.
9. Back up data
Place your data (or a copy of it) in the cloud or on an external hard drive in case your device is damaged, lost, or stolen. By doing so, you will always be able to access it.
10. Scan business cards
There are numerous card scanner apps and tools that you can use to make the process simple. Some examples include CamCard, Evernote (premium), and NeatReceipts.
11. Unsubscribe from newsletters
Clean up your inbox and make room for information that you care about. Unsubscribe from newsletters that you never read and create filters for emails that you want to read later. You can set up the filters so they direct emails to specific folders for later review.
12. Clean up emails
Read them, delete them, or store them. For emails more than 5 years old, do a mass delete.
13. Clean up bookmarks
Bookmarking webpages can become a form of virtual hoarding. If you haven’t gone back to read a page that you've bookmarked within the past year, delete it.
14. Update website copyright
It reflects that you keep your content up to date.
15. Sync calendars
How many calendars do you have on your computer? How many on your cell phone? Do you have a preferred calendar tool like Outlook, Google, Yahoo? Choose one as the default and set up the others so that you can save invitations to the default calendar.
16. Clean up databases
If you utilize tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, etc., take time to clean up your databases to maximize the potential of reaching your target market. It’s also good to make a habit of getting rid of bad or undeliverable email addresses.
17. Delete contacts
Use the Contacts directory on your cell phone for storing information for important personal and professional contacts. Store all other contacts in an app or desktop tool. With fewer contacts on your devices, you will also cut down on the amount of time it takes to sync your device with other technologies.
18. Color-code emails, tasks, etc.
Color-coding can be great for keeping information and files organized and easily distinguishable. The trick is to come up with the best system for you and try to use the same colors across multiple things. For example, you can color-code emails as they come in, file folders in a cabinet, appointments on a calendar, and contacts on a phone. Decide on what each color stands for whether it’s an action to take or simply the designation of a category to a thing, apply your color-coding rules to everything.
19. Streamline chat groups
Decide on the best way that you want people to chat with you and funnel communications there. Do you prefer texts, GroupMe, WhatsApp, or social media private messages? Whichever you prefer, begin to streamline your communication tools to minimize the noise from multiple tools.
20. Streamline entertainment apps
If you love your music, podcasts, audiobooks, video streaming apps, etc., decide what works best for each purpose and cancel the rest. Streamlining will also save you some money in the new year.
Desk with tech devices
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Bonus Tip 1. Review Subscriptions/ Reward Passes
If you have multiple fitness passes, supermarket passes, loyalty passes, etc., there are apps that save you space and time. The apps allow you to scan all of your passes so that you don’t have to carry them around with you. Key Ring is one app that you can use but there are several others.
Bonus Tip 2. Go Paperless
If you don’t need to read the information on paper, take time to switch your personal and business accounts to paperless notifications to cut down on mail and more. With any paper that you already have in your home or office, take time to scan them and store them online.
Bright days ahead
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Feeling pumped and ready to declutter your devices? Keep in mind that you don’t have to tackle everything in one day. It’s the first month of the new decade so with all of your planning and preparing, just make sure that you carve out some time to get your tech life together so that this year you have the digital space for whatever comes your way.
11 Ways to Improve Vocabulary in Just One Day
Make good use of your tablet
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Next time you’re reading an e-book and come across a word you don’t know, try highlighting it with your finger and looking for the option to look it up. Many tablets provide a dictionary definition in a little bubble, so you wont lose your place or have to switch between Google and your novel. Keep yourself up-to-date with the new words added to the dictionary in the 2010s.
Read magazines
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If you want to improve vocabulary, don’t just flip through your favorite magazine, really read it. That means don’t just look at the pictures or skim product roundups; pay attention to the articles and photo captions. According to the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, magazines on topics you’re interested in like sports, interior decorating, or health are filled with words you probably don’t think to use in your daily conversations. When you read the next issue, keep an eye out for the words you learned the month before; chances are, you’ll remember what they mean this time.
Listen to how words sound
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Many people won’t remember tricky words unless they come across them frequently. But if you hear a word that you think sounds interesting, you become word conscious and start using it yourself, says Neuman. Try sprinkling these 7 fancy words that make you sound smarter into a conversation.
15 Organizations Join Los Alamos’ Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium in First Year
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Jan. 28, 2020—Just over a year after Los Alamos National Laboratory launched the Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium (EMC3), 15 companies, universities and federal organizations are now working together to explore new ways to make extreme-scale computers more efficient.
“In the first year of EMC3 we have already seen efficiency improvements to HPC in a number of areas, including the world’s first NVMe-based hardware-accelerated compressed parallel filesystem, in-situ analysis enabled on network adapters for a real simulation code, identifying issues with file system metadata performance in the Linux Kernel, record-setting in situ simulation output indexing, demonstrating file-system metadata indexing, and more,” said Gary Grider, High Performance Computing division leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We look forward to welcoming more members over the next year and collaboratively investigating ways to realize greater efficiency as well as a new year of productive collaborations with our treasured existing members.”
Fifteen companies, universities and federal organizations are now working together to explore new ways to make extreme-scale computers more efficient. Image courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Efficiency does not simply mean spending money to attain more power, cooling, or flops; eventually, more efficient HPC solutions will be needed. The co-design of application and hardware has largely become about fitting applications to the latest hardware trends in industry. EMC3 seeks real co-design, Grider said, which has been dubbed “codesign2,” where current and emerging applications experts, computer scientists, system architects and the hardware, software, and infrastructure engineers synergistically work together in a balanced manner to reach higher degrees of performance efficiency, application efficiency and workload efficiency. In essence, EMC3 is furthering the move from architectures guiding the applications to applications guiding the architectures for the most demanding needs.
The consortium’s primary focus is on the most demanding multi-physics applications involving largely unstructured/sparse problems that require a balance of compute, memory size, memory bandwidth, memory latency, network, and I/O. The consortium has mission HPC users, developers and technologists.
The following companies are part of EMC3:
EMC3 will continue to support and encourage joint collaborations. Over the summer of 2019, DDN, Cray, and Mellanox collaborated on efficiency-related joint areas of interest with students at Los Alamos’ Ultra Scale Research Center. This year, EMC3 will influence future supercomputing hardware and system software in many mission centric areas.
“The focus will remain on nurturing architecture, component, workflow, infrastructure, and applications-algorithm areas that can improve the overall efficiency of our supercomputers,” Grider said. “Together, as a consortium, we can pursue greater efficiency for systems that feature multi-link scale, very unstructured and irregular memory access, and have many simultaneously running scientific packages that are mission critical for our EMC3 HPC site members and at Los Alamos to run at immense scale for many months.”
All U.S. HPC industry base consumers and national and international HPC component and system developers are encouraged to join EMC3. Read more about Los Alamos National Laboratory’s EMC3 effort.
About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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