5 New Year's Resolutions For Your Phone

Given how much time we spend staring at our phone, it seems foolish to exclude your phone from your New Year's resolutions. Ok, granted, if you're me, you don't make New Year's resolutions so much as New Year's vague suggestions. But is that any excuse to ignore our cyber-life whilst contemplating all the ways we can improve ourselves over the next 12 months?

Answer: no. It's time for us to take a hard look at our phone habits and resolve to do the following...‍

Clean your phone.

‍Seriously, folks. I bet your phone is filthy. God knows mine is and I barely leave my apartment. Which is dumb, because it takes no time at all to clean it: take it out of its case, grab a microfiber cloth and spray the phone lightly with a mix of distilled water and 70% isopropyl alcohol (don't spray the mix directly onto the phone because you don't want liquid to get into microphone holes or USB ports), and wipe it down front and back. Presto! a clean phone! Now remember to do that more than once a year.

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Don't leave people on 'read'.

‍Ok, this is a bit of a grey area. We all know that sometimes we glance at a message and think "oh, I should reply to that" and then we instantly forget all about it. That's rude, sure, but understandable. But we also all know that sometimes we flat out don't feel like responding, and leave the message un-responded on purpose, because we all have plausible deniability when it comes to texting. "Oh, no Mom, sorry I didn't see your message until just now!" So don't be rude to your poor mother, she just wants to see how you're doing.

‍Please, please, please, for the love of God don't have a "funny" voicemail message.

‍That whole “Hello … hello? … hello? … just kidding, leave me a message" joke wasn't funny the first time, and it sure as heck ain't funny the eight millionth time. Record your custom voicemail greeting for free with TextNow, and then re-record it as many time as you need, until it's just right.

‍Go easy with the emojis.

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There are 3,136 emojis currently active according to the Unicode.Org consortium. I'm telling you right now: That's about three-thousand one hundred and thirty-five too many.  I'm pretty confident I know the meaning of about five of them, because I'm old and super into words. Which means the finer subtleties of emoji are lost on me --- does the hearts-for-eyes face mean you love something MORE than just a regular heart? What about the hugging a heart one? Give old people like me a break already and use some words between little pictograms of happy faces and poop. Or better yet, express yourself with GIFs! Easier to interpret, and let's face it, they're infinitely more entertaining.

‍Learn some acronyms.

‍I know, I know. Keeping up with internet-speak is like trying to catch snowflakes with a butterfly net. That said, it's 2021 so it's long past time you learned LOL means "Laughing Out Loud" and not "Lots Of Love." And maybe learn a few others too....