Starting the new year with technology doesn’t have to mean buying a new wearable and going for a run. Here are five easy things anyone can do these days.
As a new year begins, we look to the traditional approach of self-improvement, kicking off the another 365 days with resolutions.
Centred around ways to improve yourself with goals you intend to hold onto, our resolutions often serve as a way to start the year positively with an idea of something that we can fix because the new year can represent a new you.
Technology can often play a part assisting, largely because the price of a gadget and that initial spend holds us to the idea that we have to keep trying. If you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on a new Apple Watch in the goal of losing weight, you don’t typically give up immediately after if only to make the cost of that wearable worth it.
But you don’t have to spend money on technology at all to start a new year.
Start by cleaning your appliances
You can start the year with a bit of a healthy clean of the technology you don’t always regard as technology. Whitegoods like your fridge and washing machine are a perfect place to start, because they can help give these gadgets a bill of health much like you might have been planning for yourself.
For your fridge, open the door and look through the food, throwing out what’s expired because it’s taking up space and shouldn’t be there. Once that’s done, give the shelves a clean with soapy water and check the seals if they’re working as well as they should. If they’re not, you might need to buy a new fridge later in the year, and given the cost, this could give you a long-term goal.
A clean fridge is a great way to start the year off, and it’s not the only one. Empty the crumb tray in your toaster, wipe down your coffee machine, and embrace a refreshed kitchen with cleaner tech inside.
Make your way to the laundry and see what you can do there, cleaning out the lint filter and any other filter that’s a pain to do, with a drum clean something you can do after.
Give your appliances a clean bill of health and start the new year right for the bigger, more expensive gadgets in your home.
Consider changing your wallpaper and ringtone
Now to the smaller but still quite expensive gadget in your life: your phone.
Start the new year by doing something you might not have done ever, or maybe just once or twice in your ownership: changing out your wallpaper and your ringtone.
It’s a simple and free tech change that will have you glancing down and feeling like you have a new phone, because something in your life has changed. And anyone can do it without spending money.
Try a new playlist, podcast, or genre station
If you subscribe to a music service, consider using the start of the new year to try something different. A new genre, station, playlist or sound, allowing yourself to think out of the box and challenging yourself to hear something new.
Consider something like Apple Music’s Discovery station, where nothing you’ve ever heard is played, or even browsing through Spotify’s list of genres and just picking something you’ve never tried.
Alternatively, consider checking out a podcast you’ve never heard before, diving into someone’s stories and listening to something new. You might just learn something.
Sign up for an online course
While we’re on the subject of learning, consider signing up for an online course to proactively learn something new for the year.
This one can cost money, but may not depending on where you go. While services such as Udemy can be handy to learn new ideas, YouTube has plenty to offer, while there are plenty of other free sources to dive into new learnings.
When this journalist decided to learn how to code as an adult in SwiftUI, he found free websites such as FreeCodeCamp and Hacking with Swift proved incredibly helpful in that journey.
The best part of undertaking your own learning is that there’s no end date to the goal. You don’t have to learn by a certain date, and can just learn at your own pace. It could just improve your career in the process.
Finally, update your passwords
Finally, considering undertaking something truly important in your digital life: dealing with your passwords.
Easily one of the most important tech-related things you can do, checking and updating your passwords is important because they’re regularly under threat from scammers and criminals, and always need a look at. Many people use the same passwords across services, increasing risk throughout, and we need to be better.
With the start of a new year often about being that better, updating your passwords is something we can all kick the year off with. We included this one in last year’s things to do for the new year because it was so important, and it still is.
It’s worth noting that we’re at a critical point where passwords are not only incredibly important and part of our digital lives, but also changing, as passkeys take over and connect our phones as part of the password process.
If you’re looking at your passwords now, consider switching on its two-factor or multi-factor authentication aspect of the service to improve the security. If there’s an option for an authentication service such as Google Authenticator, or even a passkey, make sure your phone is connected either with an app or the phone number.
And then look at your passwords, and we mean really look at them.
Work out if your passwords are too simple, and if they are, either settle on a complex password for the service that can be managed by either a browser or password manager, such as a service or app. Relying on a password app is one way to mitigate all of this problematic remembering, and if you’re someone living in the Apple ecosystem, you may already have access to the “Passwords” app added in iOS 18 for the iPhone and iPad.
Alternatively, considering coming up with your own password code. This could be a phrase only you know where some letters are replaced by numbers, and then possibly an extra two letters on the end to designate the service, such as “fb” for Facebook or “tk” for TikTok, with an exclamation point to cap it all off.
Do what you can to remedy and refresh your passwords to stave off the drama before it happens. It’ll definitely happen later this year — password drama is unavoidable — so getting on top of it before it does could just start the new year right.
