4 Things You Should Do in the First Week of Every January

January 03, 2016

I don’t believe in New Years Resolutions.

The reason they don’t work is because anyone with the self-discipline to make changes like “lose weight”, or “drink less alcohol” simply would do these things whenever they occurred to them. They wouldn’t wait for an arbitrary calendar date.

Anyway.

Here’s my preferred method: put the following things on your calendar for the first week of January:

  1. Ensure that you’re properly backing up all the data that matters to you and your family. Whether those are local backups, cloud backups, physical copies in a safe-deposit box…whatever.

  2. Pick the 10 people who matter most to you and write them a short note telling them how you feel. Let them know that they’re important to you.

  3. Confirm that all your passwords are in a password manager or are using a very strong, memorized password scheme, and that you have two-factor enabled for the accounts that support it.

  4. Ensure you have your BugOutBag set up. This is a small survival kit for things like earthquakes, hurricanes, or whatever kind of disruption of public services. It’s not prepper-level paranoia; it’s safety common sense.

Summary

There are things that should be done at least yearly, and make sense to do in the first week of January when everyone else is talking about resolutions.

When they ask you what yours are, tell them these four things. Hopefully it’ll convince them to do them as well.

Notes

  1. I recommend a combination of local and cloud backups for most situations.

  2. Rotate the people you send notes to so you get proper coverage.

  3. The note thing is something you’d be doing a MINIMUM of once per year.

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