Clean Up Your (Online) Mess in 2020

OK, we're a week or two into a new decade, and if you're like me - it's time to clean things up online - the same way we do after cleaning up after the holidays offline, like a new healthy diet or getting back in the gym.

I wrote a post a few years ago about this, but it felt like time for an updated list of a few things that I like to do to clean up my technology every new year. Some are easy tactics, some are strategic shifts. Either way, give these a go. Let me know what you think and if I forgot any good ones, ok?

1. One of the easy ones - change your passwords. Shout out to my buddy TJ Hucka who taught me this one. On January 1, or any regular rotation you choose, you swap out all of your passwords for new ones. Did you know pro sports teams change theirs monthly? Not a bad idea, if you have the time. It's actually very easy with an app like 1Password or LastPass. Both are affordable for professionals. If you're in charge of a ton of profiles or anything high-profile, it's the best money you'll ever spend on technology at some point.
2. Clean up your inbox! It's easy if you use one of my favorite utilities of the last 10 years... unroll.me. I think I unsubscribed from 400 emails at one time a few years back. The things you want to keep get "rolled up" into a newsletter that is curated with the emails you actually want. Unsub from the rest! I do this about every 6 months.
3. Delete some apps! You don't need all those, and they're probably tracking you or using up battery juice you can use for something productive.
4. Back up your photos to the cloud. Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Flickr, Facebook are all decent ways to stash photos so they're not *only* on your phone or laptop. Eventually you'll get a new one, it won't have the same type of USB or something as your old pc or external hard drive, and then those photos are goners.
5. Ever watch a TV show or a sporting event where you tweeted something while emotional? (guilty here). Check out TweetDelete and clean up your twitter history. Perfect for people looking to change up their career, run for an elected role, or a volunteer opportunity.
6. Does your social network content jive with what you are most passionate about? Can't believe you haven't posted about X for a while? It might be time for you to do a quick exercise about what you want your profile to represent. Social networks were designed to be a reflection of the real you, and most provide that opportunity. The exception of course, is Twitter, which irresponsibly allows any bot to create a hundred more bots to post and share controversial fictional political propaganda, usually, but that's a topic for another post. Here's 3 things you can do to dial in your content:

• Pick 4 things you love, consider hobbies or things you consider yourself knowledgeable about - and one you'd like to become more knowledgeable about in the new year. Draw 5 boxes in a line on a sheet of paper and fill them in using a word to describe each...
• Then, sign up for RightRelevance.com - select those same 5 topics and receive email about each on a daily basis. Share them using Buffer, a free scheduling tool, but don't be a bot. Be sure you always include your own take on each article. Start conversations. Make new friends and industry peers. Easy as that.
• Download Tweetdeck and repeat the step above, except the topics should be the hashtags most prominently used in those 5 topics' conversations. Engage with the best stuff, and retweet the stuff you endorse.

Finally, let's clean up our act offline.

Can we be better humans while using our technology. Ever see people doing these dirty digital deeds?

• inappropriate time to have earbuds in/out
• texting during meetings
• phones high up at a concert or sporting event
• using a loud speaker phone in public
• walking in front of people who are taking a photo
• generally just paying attention to devices instead of people

Oh, and finally - how great would it be if we could put an end to the really dirty digital deeds like reply-all-ing at work, spreading fake news, texting and driving and trolling? We're better than that, aren't we?

Let me know if any of these are helpful for you in the comments. Thanks for reading!