An average person would have anywhere from ten to fifteen online or offline accounts with different passwords. Creating and remembering the passwords for all accounts can be a challenge. In addition to that its always recommended to change you passwords regularly. I have found plenty of tips online on creating passwords that are secure however not much has been said about creating passwords that help you remember to change them.
In order to remember to change your passwords try following tips:
1. Follow a convention for creating passwords that include month and year. This convention of creating passwords could be similar to naming packages in JAVA or simply put could use following format : <YEAR><MONTH><YOUR PASSWORD>. For those familiar with JAVA, I have omitted dots from the name. Remember that when creating passwords with such a format, the complexity of passw0rd lies in what you place in <YOUR PASSWORD> field. Therefore please do not think that by using this format you are compromising the strength of the password. Now every time you enter your password you wold know how long it has been since you had changed it. The burden is off course on you to change it if it has been more than a month (or year if choose to change your password every year). Another format that I personally use is of the form <MONTH_TO_CHANGE_PASSWORD><YOUR PASSWORD>. This format uses month in which you intend to change your password. It gives you a whole month to act and change your password. Once the month to change your password has passed you are late and need to take swift action. From then on every time you log on you will be reminded that you are late in changing your password now. The benefit of former format compared to this one is that you can always guess the year and month you had entered as the password prefix if you change it regularly.
2. If you use a password manager then above trick would not help you. Every time you need access to a site via a password, your password manager would it for you automatically. In such a scenario the only way to remind you to do it is via reminders. There are ways to have your reminders created via self notes, sticky notes etc. However one effective way is to use Google Calenders. Setting up reminders is very easy in Google calenders and best of all the reminders are delivered directly to your inbox.
