As Apple itself recently noted, most new year’s resolutions don’t last very long. When it comes to daily gym visits and diets, so many people have given up by the second Friday in January that it has come to be known as Quitter’s Day.
But there are some steps you can take with your Apple devices that make it extremely easy to keep up new habits once you’ve done the simple prep …
Sleep tracking
Getting enough high-quality sleep is one of the biggest favors we can do for our own health. If you wear an Apple Watch, there’s a really simple way you can use it for sleep-tracking as well as all-day use.
As I discovered some years ago, you can wear an Apple Watch all night, put it on charge while you do your morning routine of showering and breakfast and so on, and then put it back on when you leave your home or start work. It will then be recharged ready for the day.
Once you’ve incorporated this into your morning routine for a week or so, it becomes automatic. If you prefer not to have to think about it, then a smart ring or simpler fitness band may be a better bet, as these go longer periods between recharges.
Zap apps and notifications for mental health
One of the biggest favors I did for my mental health was to remove time-suck apps – those that ended up taking more of my time than was justified by the pleasure or benefits I got from them – and to switch off or tone down most notifications.
You can read here about the approach I took, and it’s something I highly recommend everyone do.
Go paperless
When I first went paperless back in 2011, it was a fairly radical thing to do, and not without its challenges. These days, it’s a much more mainstream idea, and it’s never been easier to do.
If you haven’t yet taken this step, I again highly recommend it.
Organize folders on your Mac
If you’re one of those people who has a desktop or Downloads folder full of files, taking an hour once to create a good folder structure can create a habit that will make your life easier from this point on.
The exact folder structure you need will be unique to you, but there are some standard folders you’re likely to find useful, and some guidelines that will help with the rest. Here are the folders I suspect will be useful to most people:
- Finance
- Legal
- Household (a place to store user guides, etc)
- Health
- Temporary
That latter one is where I store documents I know I’ll only need to reference for a short time. In my case, it sits within my Dropbox folder so it’s also where I keep things I want to make available to others before deleting once they’ve downloaded.
You may want sub-folders too. For example, within Finance you might want folders for Tax, Mortgage, Pension, and so on.
You’ll likely benefit from one folder per hobby, with sub-folders useful for more involved ones.
The beauty of this process is that once you’ve created your folders, moved files into them, and spent a week or so getting used to it, then it quickly becomes automatic. Starting to get organized requires a little work, but staying organized becomes really easy.
App folders
The same thing applies to other apps you use a lot, with Mail and Notes topping the list for most people.
If you make extensive use of the Notes app, as I do, you can end up with many hundreds of them – perhaps even a thousand or more. Organizing them into logical folders can make life much easier. Even better, Notes supports nested folders, which lets you mirror the structures you use for your SSD.
With Apple’s Mail app (and most others), you can not only create folders for manual sorting, but also email rules that will automatically direct mail into the appropriate folder.
Apple’s Calendar app supports multiple calendars, so you can take advantage of these to color-code your life. This can be a great aid to maintaining balance in your activities, and a huge help for shared family calendars.
If you have other apps you use frequently that also support folders, do the same with these.
Review your backup regime
There’s a saying in the IT world that there are two types of people: those who have experienced major data loss, and those who are going to experience major data loss. Drives are far more reliable than they used to be, but both hard drives and SSDs can and do fail.
Another saying is “One is none, two is one.” In other words, if you have one copy of your data, that becomes none when a failure occurs, and if you have a single backup, that becomes all you have when the main drive fails and you’re then as vulnerable as someone without a backup. For data that would cause major problems if lost, the advice is to have at least three copies, one of them off-site.
My own approach is a local Time Machine backup, plus all my documents are within my Dropbox folder, providing an automatic third copy that is also off-site. I favor Dropbox because I find it faster to sync than iCloud and because it offers an add-on feature for 30-day recovery of deleted files. That lets it act a bit like a Time Machine backup if I accidentally delete a file (I can think of only one time I’ve ever done it, but I prefer not to take chances).
Review your subscriptions
While the cost of individual subscriptions are often trivial, they can very quickly add up. A study last year showed the average American spends almost $1,000 a year on streaming video apps alone.
Sit down with a bank statement and review all your subscriptions, then decide which ones you use and enjoy enough to justify the subscription. When I did this, I found I was hardly viewing any Netflix content, for example. For Apple TV, I wait until all the episodes of a new show are available, then subscribe for one month to binge-watch them (Pluribus omnibus coming up!).
You can check out all your app subscriptions on your iPhone: Settings > Your name > Subscriptions. This includes your Apple services, third-party apps, and AppleCare (make sure you’re not still paying this for a device you no longer own!).
Review your privacy
Finally, take steps to review your privacy. On iPhone and Mac, check the app permissions in Settings > Privacy & Security, and remove permissions from apps you no longer use or which have more privileges than they need.
Be particularly vigilant about reviewing Location Services, as location data is often resold. Personally, I use the While Using option by default, and Never when there’s no benefit to me in an app knowing where I am.
Unsubscribe from marketing emails that no longer interest you, and check the default privacy setting for your social media posts. Unless you want everyone to be able to see all your posts, then set privacy to Friends or Followers.
What would be your own new-year recommendations for Apple devices? Please share in the comments.
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