You know the feeling of dread you get when you type in a password you were certain you knew, and it gets rejected?
Suddenly nothing is certain, and it could be one of about six different passwords, of which you’ve got ten permutations, depending on the restrictions of various apps and services…ugh.
Well, since passwords aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, here are three things you could try, in order to make the relationship between you and your passwords a little more harmonious.
1) Create your passwords using a “template”
Pick a combination of words and numbers that you like. You will be using this as the passphrase for ALL your products and services that need one. Crucially, though, you’re going to reserve one chunk of the phrase to be a variable. This part will change for every service.
So if your template is MyPass391____! then your password for Dropbox would be MyPass391dropbox! and your password for your Shaw email would be MyPass391shaw!
Like any system, this will only work if you train yourself to use it, so you have to make sure all your passwords follow the pattern. This way, if you’re ever wondering what the password to your long-forgotten Ebay account is 2 years from now, you can confidently try MyPass391ebay! and stand a good chance of being right.
2) Use Imagery
There is an excellent comic at www.xkcd.com that explains this notion so well, we’re just going to show it to you:
Most services will force you to include capitals and numbers in your passwords, but you can usually get away with capitalizing the first letter, and throwing a number in place of the first vowel. With that taken into account, mental imagery can be a great way to easily memorize long, complex pass-phrases.
3) Get Help From An App
If you already have dozens of different passwords and don’t want to go through the hassle of changing them all to git one schema, 1Password is a great app many of our clients use which can be a life-saver.
It will store all your passwords behind lock and key (the titular One Password, which will be the only one you must continue to remember), sync them across all your devices, and even attempt to automatically fill them in for you in other apps and web forms.
