CiD's Favourite Time Hacks: 1Password

(No sponsorship involved – many other password manager tools are available.)

Image from 1Password

We’ve all been there – wrestling with the mental gymnastics of password recall, grappling with whether the password ended with ‘*’ or '!'.

Fact: on average we each have more than 100 passwords to remember on a regular basis. Considering our brains are wired with short-term memory loss and the multitude of other things we're also trying to retain; we can realistically only handle about 20.

Add the time pressure in the moment of recall, and multiple other distractions in the background, and this scenario, played out again and again, amounts to a huge drain on our time, not to mention a source of stress and frustration. It’s continuous, and daily.

(Worst case scenario: click ‘forgot password’ – chase tail for 10 minutes looking for verification email... or worse, lock yourself out after too many failed attempts. Digital stress on a new level.)

To bypass this it’s tempting to fall back to using similar passwords for different accounts. Easier? Yes. Safe? Far from it. Apparently, it's the cyber equivalent of leaving your front door open with a welcome mat for criminals.

Cue the knight in digital armour: 1Password (or your password manager of choice). These tech guardians generate, remember, and auto-fill in your passwords for you. But there's more. Among the wide range of information it can store and recall, it also securely holds credit card info.

For that late-night online errand, you had to run, no need to scramble around looking for your credit card in semi-darkness, typing one-handed. Those days are over. A couple of clicks and you’re done. For me the biggest time saver of all.

Then there can be *anything* else – NI, passport, driving licence numbers, gym-entry PINs, postcodes and other hard-to-remember data. Every new online form you encounter will be filled out quicker than you can blink.

It's like having your own digital butler who sits patiently on your taskbar or bookmark bar until you need him.

Cost? After a free trial, it’s $2.99 / month, or $4.99 for a whole household where you can divide information into vaults and share some, but not all, passwords with different family members.

And as the name suggests, you only need to remember 1 master password. Better make it a good one. Tip from a tech guru – make it a kind of weird sentence with a range of characters and punctuations.

For me, 1P has been both life-changing and mind-blowing.

There was life before 1Password and now there is life after 1Password.

Incrementally it has saved *so* much time day to day, I would actually categorise it as a productivity tool first.

I’ve even got mine hooked up to my webcam so that I only need to gaze into the eye of the camera and 1Password will open and start filling out passwords and online forms for me.

If you were worried about security (can it really be safe to hold so much sensitive information in one place?), fear not. 1Password uses end-to-end encryption. Meaning nobody, not even 1Password, can access your information. It's like a digital vault, and only you have the key.

Let’s face it, the password-remembering odds are stacked against us, and with so much else to remember, it’s time to delegate the digital stress and time-wasting, and let 1Password do the heavy lifting.

You won’t look back.