Things to do at each New Year

Here is a list of things I do at the start of each new year:

1. Archive my prior-year's Gmail (all of these take a while, depending upon your inbox).


• Search on the prior year's email using the expression, after:2016/12/31 before:2018/1/1
• Select ALL, and apply the label OLD INBOX
• Select ALL of the emails meeting the above 2 criteria.
• Archive them, and viola! Your inbox now only has emails for 2018.


2. Change Passwords


• This can be as simple as adding 18 or 2018 or something for the new year somewhere in your password.  For example, change PassW0rd to 20PassW0rd18.
• To check the strength of my passwords, I like to use both:
• http://www.passwordmeter.com/, e.g.,
• password scores 8%
• PassW0rd scores 56%
• 20PassW0rd18 scores 100%
• I've capitalized various letters and replaced o with 0, which you can also do to i/1, e/3, s/5, t/7, b/8, g/9, for example.
• If you want you can also then spell out the numbers, e.g., zero or z3r0 to result in 20PassWz3r0rd18 (also 100%).
• https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm (there are a lot of these out there), using a brute force "Offline Fast Attack Scenario", which is one hundred billion guesses per second):
• password could be cracked in 2.17 seconds;
• PassW0rd could be cracked in 37.66 minutes;
• 20PassW0rd18 could be cracked in 10.43 centuries; and
• 20PassWz3r0rd18 could be cracked in 2.48 million centuries.
• You can see the difference adding 2018 to PassW0rd decreases "crackability" (aka, improves strength) from minutes to centuries.  If I replaced the 1 with a !, it would also improve the strength. (e.g., 1/!, 8/$)
• 20PassWz3r0rd!8 could be cracked in 1.49 billion centuries.


3. Review my cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive & OneDrive) and auto-subscribed services (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) for cost and consolidation.


4. Obtain copies of my Free Annual Credit Reports.


5. Prepare to file my taxes using Turbo Tax Online for the first week in Feb.