It’s hard to ignore what seems to be a weekly headline, “millions of password hacked”. Passwords are needed for many of the sites that you visit each and every day. Banking, social accounts, CRM tools, heck, even a password is needed to log into P1 Learning.

We get it, it’s tough to have multiple passwords for multiple accounts. But it’s key that you don’t use the same password for any two sites, and you really shouldn’t be writing them down anywhere. Yeah, I know. It sounds a bit crazy. So many passwords to remember, so what do you need to do?

If you’re a home row password user, which means your password is “ASDFGHJKL”, try “QWERTYUIO” or “WERTYUIP[“. You might try typing every other letter in CAPS. If you use words within your passwords, try separating words with an underscore “_”. Or, you could use numbers for letters. Example, use “3” for the letter “E” or “5” for the letter “S”. Getting the idea? Good!

If you’d like to take it to the next step, how about using part of the website for a customized password? For instance, if using frequent flier miles for Southwest Airlines, try “SWA” then use your standard birthday, “SWA07131982”. This way each of your passwords are similar, yet different.

If you’re serious, change your passwords on January 1st every year. If you’re paranoid change them every month. And, if you’re forced to change, go ahead and change ALL of your passwords at the same time even if they don’t need changing.

As a last resort, we’d encourage a secure password program for your computer such as 1Password, LastPass 3.0, or Dashlane 2.0. Anything is better than storing all of your passwords in a generic Word document titled, “passwords”.

For additional password tips checkout our course titled, “Creating Passwords”.