The 21 worst tech habits—and how to break them - furnesswidefirearm

You bite your nails. Your house is a sty. You never signal before changing lanes, and when you eventually reach your destination, you're 30 minutes late.

We every take over bad habits in real world. Why stool't technology help cure them? While technology should help us break bad habits, all overly often it makes things worse.

Are you guilty of a uncool tech habit? Present are 21 of the worst engineering science-oriented habits, plus potential fixes for all of them. (And we have a fillip at the end, on mending pitiful netmail habits.)

1. Leaving equipment in plain sight

The typical gadget isn't stolen away thieves who've done stacks of provision. No, most gadget heists are conceived and executed in seconds, and probably beget you left the item uncared-for. That cozy window corner at the café is great until you need to ravel back to the counter for a replenish. A thief potty pop in, snap your device, and be gone. Gadgetry is likewise usually snapped up from airport security conveyers (sadly, sometimes by TSA agents themselves) while you're waiting for your body read. Your fastened car isn't safe, either. An eager crook will happily smash your window and grab the laptop bag from the rider seat, even in broad daylight.

Make: Don't leave laptops and early gadgets unattended. Yes, that agency you must either take them to the priv or leave them with somebody you trust. At a café, it doesn't injure to ask the staff if you can leave something behind the parry for a minute. In any slip, skip asking, "Can you watch this for me?" and pointing at your PC across the room.

2. Unmindful gadget usage

Here's how street hoods steal your headphone. They lurk at the acme of the steps arsenic you emerge from the underground, or sneak functioning behind you piece you're lounging at an outdoor café. Either way, you have no idea they'ray there, because your nose is buried in your smartphone's Facebook feed. Future thing you know, you've been punched in the face, and the thieves are spiffy off to a getaway car. Posterior you identify the suspects? No, because the last thing you saw before it happened was a picture of a pup.

Get: Everyone uses phones everywhere, so it doesn't feel dangerous to break one out connected the train operating theater while walk-to zero in the dark. Simply electronics remain some of the most easily enclosed items on the black market, and it pays to keep your wits about you when using them in an unknown plac. Get in a policy to limit mobile device exercis to areas where you're completely doomed you won't be the victim of a smash-and-grab attack. That goes double for victimization your phone patc you'Ra dynamic. Don River't become another statistic!

3. Using your devices with unjust hands

Anyone who has ever bimanual a cell call to a child knows that the device will rejoin covered in a crust of dirt, crumbs, chocolate, and sneeze spray.

But you aren't much fitter. Playing Bejeweled while Andrew Jackson Downing a burrito won't bequeath your phone looking fresh, and retention your phone against your face to talk English hawthorn leave-taking an oily shadow behind.

This isn't just gross, simply brings health risks, too: The old saw that your keyboard is dirtier than your toilet applies to your telephone set, as well. One report last year claimed that a Ugandan thief contractile Ebola from a stolen telephone.

Fix: Keep an electronics-cleaning vial happening your desk in plain consider. Clean your headphone, tablet, and other touch screen devices daily. Add a quick wipe-down any time you visualize circumpolar colly.

4. Not cleaning your equipment

We covered the trouble of filthy touchscreens (increasingly problematic in the Windows 8 era) in the #3 detail, supra. But what about everything else?

Literally everything in your high-tech arsenal is insecure to wrong from dust and dirt. Grime seeps in through any crack and crevice, but machines such as desktops, laptops, and even printers, which ingest air-intake vents for cooling, are the most affected. Dust generally won't hurt electronics, but information technology can clog fans, opthalmic-drive mechanisms, and other moving parts, which can lead to component failures and overheating if the fans stop practical decently. Dust in scanners and printers can affect the quality of your printouts, besides.

Fix: Cleansing your equipment isn't hard, but it's important to do so regularly before things material body up excessively much. Once or double a year should roll in the hay. Can't remember? Try cleaning out your PC at the same time you replace the filter on your furnace or publicize conditioner, or whenever you get the oil on your car changed. A calendar reminder on your PC can help, overly.

5. Posing with unspeakable posture at the computer

The posture lessons, cautionary tales, and ergonomic gadgets of the other 30 years have plain taught us nothing, and as a result, carpal tunnel syndrome is the about common form of neurological syndrome named entrapment neuropathy, affecting 5.8 percent of the population. The veritable treatment, even for moderate cases, is surgery. And all begrounds you were too lazy to sit up correct.

Fix: Fixing this problem requires a proper work environs. Keep your chair at a height so that your knees bend at a 90-degree angle; also hold your feet flat on the floor, your varan directly in figurehead with the top of the silver screen at centre level, and your keyboard placed so your wrists are parallel of latitude with the floor.

This is easier said than done if, as information technology is for galore, your office is now a Starbucks. But Imak Estimator Gloves buttocks keep your wrist joint at the correct typewriting angle and cushion your hand—an easy solution that you send away drop into your gadget bag.

6. Not taking breaks

Most parents have No trouble constrictive their children's screen time, but they find it harder to put pop their laptops or smartphones when work demands action (or Angry Birds chirps).

Breaks are life-sustaining to unspoiled health. Your joints, muscular system, cardiovascular system, and eyes all benefit from a convert of scenery once in a while. Remaining in a sitting lay for big periods of time can cause blood clots (sometimes steady fatal ones). And opened at a screen for hours on end can cause asthenopia that Crataegus laevigata affect your imagination afterwards and make it self-destructive to drive home.

Get: As luck would have it, programs such American Samoa Scirocco Take a Break, mobile apps, and Browser plug-ins can prompt you to step out from your gadgets, stretch your legs, get a drink of irrigate, surgery call it a day on your computer time.

Other easy way to remedy the problem is to keep, at all multiplication, a very heroic glass of water at your desk (the result for another bad habit: loser to hydrate). Sipping a gulping from that glass of water on a regular basis will force you to lease an occasional break to the lav.

7. Working with your laptop connected your lap

Worst Tech Habit — A laptop on your lap can mean bad strength and problems from its heat.

Yes, they telephone call it a laptop, merely you weren't acknowledged to aim that literally. Using your laptop along your lap can lead to a entire host of problems, many caused by the heat that most laptops spew from their undersides. The maladies can range from simple skin dispassionateness and discoloration to reduced sperm count to—the jury's unruffled out on this indefinite—cancer.

Passion International Relations and Security Network't the only problem. Placing a heavy targe across your thighs for hours on ending can causal agent neurological damage, specially when conjugate with the typical laptop-on-lap posture: hunched over, legs extended, neck craned. Arthritis lav also develop over time.

Fix: Fixes aren't pleasing unless you deficiency to move your desk into the parlor soh you lav watch Gamey of Thrones while you ferment. Instead, start with a lap desk that shields your thighs from heat, and follow the intermission-taking tips outlined in token #6. Periodically shifting your laptop from one peg to the other can help. Avoid working happening your laptop with your legs outstretched on the coffee table, likewise. Your nervous and muscular systems will be in best alignment if you keep up your knees bent and your feet along the floor.

8. Failing to back ahead data

Stop me if you've detected this one before. Everything is zipping along just smoothly until one day it of a sudden isn't. Maybe it's a calculating-drive crash, maybe it's a malware infestation, mayhap it's a taken laptop. One way or another, your data has abruptly vanished, and you're left wing crying that you should have been backing up your data.

The excuses for non backing up your data are proper increasingly thin. Whatever number of online backup services will sync your files automatically with a defile-entrepot system, whether you use a PC, a tab, or a phone. Assume't be lulled into thinking that you have nothing important thereon device. Whether information technology's a forgotten baby picture operating theatre a plot save on the verge of hitting 100 percent completion, you'll tactile property differently once IT's gone.

Fix: With about backup systems now, you don't need to coiffe anything except install an app and set information technology up. If that's overmuch movement, intimately, perhaps information technology's time to die off back to pen and paper.

9. Reusing passwords over and over

We are entirely guilty when information technology comes to this bad habit. How are you supposed to remember your 100th different watchword for the latest social network you've joined? You drive the slowly outlet and reuse a password that has worked for you time and clock again.

Password "strength" is a bit illusory. All it takes is 1 website that doesn't storage passwords securely and gets hacked, operating room one old and unencrypted velar drive that's sloppily disposed of, to bring the whole house of card game rolling down, irrespective how many numbers, uppercase letters, and special characters you use.

Fix: The solution involves coming up with a system of rules to establish a unique password founded on all website where you use it. Form from a unethical phrase and, for from each one site, add something unique to it. Take, say, Flurpb&A;rgl3r as a base and contribute fb8 to the ending for Facebook, or tw7 for Twitter. (In that example, the numerical component of the end tag is the number of characters that the site name has.)

Presto: a password that you won't forget but is virtually impossible to crack.

10. Unrivalled calculate, threefold users

A raise's typical make a motion, when giving a child his or her first computer, is to hand it over and hope for the best. Mommy so wonders where her call book went, and her boss wonders why she sent him 20 email messages full of gibberish.

Ready: Setting up multiple user accounts on Windows isn't serious, and it's an incredibly provident precaution if more than one person is going away to use the machine. Never mind the privateness issues—accidents happen, even among fully grown-ups sharing a PC. Having deuce mass working on different files called "resume.doc" can only end in heartache.

For children, security and safety are larger concerns. Mise en scene up kids with Standard User accounts (instead of Administrator) is the wise thing to do to keep unwanted software from existence installed, and IT's the key to letting you configure paternal controls on the electronic computer, also. So next time Junior wants to economic consumption your PC "real quick, just to count something up," tell him sure, and commit him his possess account.

11. Failing to update

Software publicised today is updated on a just about-constant agenda. If you have a few dozen apps on your smartphone operating theater tablet, you've probably become accustomed to downloading updates on a time unit basis—unless you'Ra one of those mass who ne'er update anything.

Software updates are released for a variety of reasons. The application's developers add features, fix bugs, and plug security holes. Installing updates upon release—particularly operative organisation updates and security software updates—is virtual to keeping your device stable and bastioned.

Fix: All application has to personify updated, so information technology's forgivable if you don't want to hand with the constant nagging to install, reboot, and double every day. Automatic updates guide some of the hassle out of this operation, but to the highest degree software updates today still have to be manually installed. There's no easy resolution to this. If immediately installing updates when they appear in the system tray surgery happening your French telephone doesn't check with your computation habits, make it a weekly event to update everything all forthwith—perhaps subsequently you take out the trash.

12. Printing anything

You've seen the petition at the merchant ship of so many email messages: "Please consider the surroundings before printing this email." Is that very necessary in 2022? Who is non considering the environment? And more profound, who is still impression out their electronic mail?

In an maturat of $75 T hard drives and endless cloud storehouse, why does anything that starts out in digital format, such as email, ever need to go second to theme? Even utility and bank statements are archived online (often for years), much safer as backups than the ones sitting in Indian file cabinets in your house.

What legitimately needs to be printed? The solitary affair I can come in up with is mailing labels for products that have to be physically shipped somewhere, and maybe the backpacking slips operating theatre receipts that are included with those packages. Also arguably acceptable is the irregular printed photograph that you'd like to couc and put on the wall.

Fix: Unplug your printer and get it in a press for a week. See if you can't go paperless, cold turkey.

13. Faxing, ever

As bad a habit as printing process is, faxing is infinitely worsened. Here, you have the chance to break the paper cycle, but instead you're continuing it, indeed declension IT away duplicating the paper and possibly racking risen long-distance telephone set charges in the process.

No disrespect to the fax machine. It was a critical piece of apparatus in American business for years, but now information technology is an superannuated relic on a par with the dial-up modem. Yes, technology has improved—you can even institutionalize color faxes in real time—but quality really has not. Most faxed documents are lul difficult to read, still come out askew, and are often incomplete, chop off away a wallpaper jampack or a problem with the phone telephone circuit. More people resort to faxes when they take to send a signed papers to another party, but in more cases a fax with a signature may not even be legally acceptable.

Fix: Fortunately, for most people, faxing is a fairly easy habit to break. Just staring at the pile of junk faxes that most businesses continue to receive is impetus enough. While your fax machine may be attached to an otherwise effective whol-in-one printer, you lavatory simply disconnect IT from the phone line, and save a few bucks a month if you're paying for a second billet for it. Plenty of free or sixpenny services john Army of the Pure you broadcast a digital fax, should you really pauperization to do and so.

14. Throwing computer equipment in the wish-wash

If you've been a computer user for any length of time, you've probably accumulated dozens of old peripherals, outdated or broken laptops, ancient mobile phone phones, and slews of cables. What do you do with that mountain of telephone line that came with every modem you ever bought? What about all those old red-white-and-yellow A/V cables bundled with the VCRs of yesteryear?

Much of this material unfortunately ends up in landfills. Some, like telephone wire, International Relations and Security Network't exactly hazardous, but anything with a electric battery or a board in it probably is. (Progressive electronics typically aren't as toxic equally sr. stuff, but that isn't what you're throwing away, is it?)

Fix: The unspoiled news is that you can fairly easily reprocess most of this junk, even interrupted cables and defunct printers. E-waste events are common in umteen neighborhoods, and both Grace and Topper Buy will take just about anything off your hands for reuse, resale, operating theater recycling.

Don't forget to scrub personal data from any insensitive labour or flash drive you recycle. Use a multipass wiping tool around such as BCWipe to shuffling sure that unlikely year's tax returns don't death improving in mortal other's hands.

15. Not interpretation the FAQs

When trouble arises online—As it always does—the knee-jerk response is to open a support slate or telephone the help desk immediately. Then you'll pass fractional an time of day on hold waiting for someone who probably pot't do much to facilitate you.

Fix: Make IT a habit to recall the FAQs. Companies love to create Ofttimes Asked Questions pages because they really do answer a great deal of common concerns. While some FAQs are more thorough than others, they're always worth a ready birl to see if you can't obtain a prompt answer to what you believe is a unique problem. Use up the search feature on your browser to scan a large document for your trouble keywords.

Information technology's good news that you at long last resolved your bunion problems. We got a boot out of that picture of the sirup micturate on your breakfast waffles. And the story about the squeaky dog toy you bought was as wel a gem.

Yes, complaining about timeworn stories, photos, and comments on Facebook and other social media sites has become a Freshman World Job of the greatest prescribe, but considering how intertwined societal media and the business world have become, the person in all likelihood to get the most is the united who does the blathering.

Fix: If you'atomic number 75 at all concerned almost your show in the world, try to keep comments single and unscheduled. Dutifully copying the latest "Follow these instruction manual or else!" post on Facebook is no better than mailing chain letters to all your friends. Restrict social media chatter to a few posts a day. You can post the lie of your conspiracy theories ad nauseam to your web log.

17. Texting at the table

Really? It's that important? We all make out our smartphones, but victimisation them in the company of others, particularly at mealtime, is just plain rude. (It's as wel gross. See item #3.)

What about the phone-in-the-lap trick? Non kosher. True Emily Post says so. And that goes for whatsoever kind of social situation, whether it's schooling, work, operating theater a simple conversation with someone else.

Fix: If you must deal with another conversation, interpreter- or text-based, take it to another room or outside. And beryllium sure to make the "no phones at the table" rule go for to everyone in your household, including yourself

18. Using your phone or pad without a subject

How will it end? Eventually your phone surgery tablet testament die. The battery may explode. The CPU may melt down. Cosmic rays may fry the RAM. But realistically, you will probably just drop it.

No thing how sure-handed you are, and no affair how carefully you treat your devices, one 24-hour interval they are going to slip out of a pocket, OR simply fall to the ground when someone's elbow bumps against you.

Fix: The only solution is to enshroud your gadgets in cases—thick, rugged ones. The flippy Sharp Cover for your iPad is useless when a preadolescent fumbles it to the roofing tile. Go for a thick rubber OR silicone polymer case that covers every corner of the device, such as the Otterbox Defender. A thinner, plastic case may do the job, only replace it when it becomes damaged.

19. Failing to pick up the phone

The phone rings. You deal the number and don't discern it. You let it go to voicemail, and that slender red light water chickweed all day until you finally swing to playing the subject matter.

Technology has bestowed us a half-dozen shipway to communicate with one and only another—virtually altogether at the expense of the quickest and nearly expedient, the telephone. It's easy to understand why we put on't answer the speech sound anymore: We likely don't want to talk to a solicitor, a pitchman, or a robotic telemarketer.

Fix: We'Ra non talking about breaking the rein against texting at the table (item #17), but a comprehensive insurance policy against answering the earpiece Crataegus oxycantha not make sense. Consider how much quicker it would be to answer a simple question via voice than to read and respond to a farseeing electronic mail message. Imagine that your $500-an-60 minutes attorney is the one who is calling. Do you really want to force him to pass 10 minutes penning an netmail to you when he could have told you something on the phone in 30 seconds?

20. Flunk to silence your phone

These years, just about every public performance begins with an entreaty to the audience to mute or turn off their cell phones. Thirty minutes late, the unmistakable jingle "Marimba" makes its presence, and its uninformed owner, known.

Cell phones that erupt at most inappropriate times are a cultural epidemic, and ironically it's likely because we have heard so many commands to shut our phones off that we simply assume't hear them at all anymore.

Fix: While you likely rear't fix the demeanor of the person sitting succeeding to you, at least you hind end ascertain you aren't part of the problem. Simply make your default setting "ringer off." Turn the bell ringer on only when you know you're releas to need to hear IT ring—that is, whatsoever time it's not in a pocket and out of arm's reach.

21. Never rebooting

For all their advances in reliability, our gadgets remain incredibly fictile to minor bugs of all kinds. Memory leaks are unruffled rampant in Windows applications, flooding your RAM to pass unusable. Numerous applications notwithstandin require reboots later they're installed operating theatre updated, and the app will be cragfast in limbo until that reboot occurs.

Windows 8 has improved reboot times (and bring up frequency), merely every operating system—whether background or Mobile River—benefits from an casual reboot. Think over of it American Samoa a good night's sleep for a device: A reboot lets it start refreshing, free of digital luggage. A reboot may improve your device's battery animation.

Situate: Build rebooting into the spontaneous downtime of your day, typically when you attend bed. Reboot your device to give IT a refresh. Improved yet, round it dispatch completely and relieve energy.

Bonus: Fix these sad email habits

Keeping a full inbox (clean it out!)

Treat your inbox like your desk, with only essentials you need at that moment. As for everything else, file it, cancel it, or channelize it to the calendar. Some task management approaches favor "inbox zero" (making your inbox totally empty), merely the "none-scroll" goal (all inbox table of contents on a single riddle) is more reachable for many.

Responding to spam (put on't!)

On that point's a conflict between a mailing list surgery a promotional newsletter you signed up for and spam. The first you can unsubscribe from—and you should, munificently—the second you cannot. Use unsubscribe links for the former and endu in a spam filter for the latter. If Spam becomes such a problem that you can't manage it, consider the midpoint option: changing your email address.

Answering immediately (think inaugural!)

It's tempting to write back to an email as cursorily American Samoa possible so you keister get it dispatch your plate (and out of your inbox), but doing that behind make up its own problems. View setting your email client to holdup its send/receive mental process by 10 operating theatre 15 transactions. This gives you the chance to edit a message, add something to it (then that there is no second message, thereby keeping down the overall number of messages that you're sending), and avert the "I accidentally hit the Send button" goof-raised. Thomas More critically, a delay lets the recipient know you took metre to put together a thoughtful reply.

Replying to all (discontinue!)

One conclude our inboxes are thus full: We send so untold netmail. Bob sends an email to a dozen people because he doesn't know who can help him solve a problem—and those 12 people so reply to everyone. Habituate 'Response to Each' sparingly, and constitute certain every receiver on an email thread needs to read your response.

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Christopher Null is a veteran technology and business diary keeper. He contributes regularly to TechHive, PCWorld, and Wired, and operates the websites Drinkhacker and Motion-picture show Noise. Disclosure: He also writes for Hewlett-Packad's marketing website TechBeacon.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451411/the-21-worst-tech-habits-and-how-to-break-them.html

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