Making up passwords is tough. There are so many rules you have to follow:
- They have to be more than N characters long.
- They shouldn’t be proper names.
- They shouldn’t be important dates like your birthday or wedding anniversary.
- They shouldn’t be words in the dictionary.
- They should be a mix of letters and numbers.
- They should be a mix of upper and lower case letters.
- They should include punctuation symbols, if possible.
So how can you make a password that looks like gibberish and still remember it? I recommend what I like to call the shopping list method.
- Write out your shopping/todo list.
- Take the first letter or number from every item in the list, in order. That’s your password.
You can leave a grocery list in your desk and nobody will think twice about it. …at least until I’m a huge success and everyone knows this method. 