Technology! For all its benefits, it creates a lot of frustration. I’ve spent January updating my old email address on what feels like hundreds of accounts as we prepare to change our internet provider. Untangling my digital life has been eye opening and frustrating.
Welcome to the 98th edition of The Sunday Spark, a series with weekly thoughts and highlights, nuggets of learning, and a simple living challenge for the week. In addition to the challenges of untangling my digital life, this week’s edition discusses upcycling e-waste into new coins, using sheep to maintain grass on solar farms, and scheduling personal downtime.
On my mind this week: Untangling my digital life
One of the biggest challenges of our digital world is keeping track of all the various logins and passwords we use every day. Email. Banking. Online shopping. Social media. Travel reservations. When you start to take stock of it all, it’s overwhelming.
Earlier this month, for no known reason, Bell suspended my email account. It took a couple of days, and some very frustrating phone calls to get back online.
Interestingly, just the day before that happened, my husband and I had been discussing that we pay too much for our Internet and cable TV services. (Yes, we are one of the rare households that still has cable TV…my husband loves his TV.)
We currently use two different providers—Bell for Internet and Rogers for cable. Consolidating our services with a single provider will save us about $100 a month and will mean one less company to deal with.
Being locked out of my Bell email was the catalyst I needed to do something I’ve been putting off for a long time. I needed to get all my subscriptions, bills, banking, and other logins off my Bell email address to give us the freedom to shop around for a better deal.
It’s worse than untangling Christmas lights
As I started to make a list of everything I needed to do, it brought to mind the image of Clark Griswold handing the huge ball of tangled Christmas lights to his son Rusty in the movie Christmas Vacation. Untangling my digital life would prove to be just as frustrating.
I been using my Bell email address for over 25 years—it’s almost as old as the Internet. Wanting to separate out the junk and marketing emails, I did set up a Gmail account a couple of years ago for online shopping. But all the important stuff was still on Bell.
Most of what comes to my Gmail is low priority, so I decided to keep it for less important things like shopping, travel, entertainment, and social media. Then, I set up an Outlook email address for things that I need to pay attention to—personal emails, bills, and important financial information.
With a plan in place, I started the painful process of updating the email address on all my accounts. Between multi-factor authentication, and accounts that don’t let you update your email address online, it has been a tedious and painful process. Every time I thought I was done, another email popped up in my Bell inbox. Will it ever end?
With my personal email under control, I needed to set up a new email for my blog and update all my blog-related logins and subscriptions. Here we go again!
Life was simpler before all of this
Almost a month later, I think I’m done.
This has been an eye-opening experience. We use technology to save us time and simplify our lives. But when you stop and think about how far your digital footprint reaches, it’s a little scary.
In many ways, life was simpler in the days of paper bills, cheques, and in-person shopping and banking.
But I suppose that genie isn’t going back in the bottle, so the best we can do is try to stay organized. I think I’ve done that. For now anyway!
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Three highlights of the week
It’s important to celebrate big milestones and simple pleasures in life. Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:
- On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a potential partner for my retirement coaching business. After my meeting, I popped into IKEA where I bought a new potato peeler. Is it sad that a new potato peeler made my highlight list?
- On Friday, the sun was shining, and temperatures reached a balmy -6C. It was a nice reprieve from the polar vortex earlier in the week. I took advantage of the sunshine and went for a walk by the Grand River in Cambridge. I snapped this picture. If you’re a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale, the wall on the left may look familiar to you. There was lots of activity in downtown Galt as they are filming upcoming shows for the series.
- I had a nice visit with my Mum on Friday. We enjoyed some of my homemade cabbage roll soup and homemade bread for lunch.
Things I learned this week
Life is all about learning. Here are a couple of things I learned this week:
Turning e-waste into coins
The Royal Canadian Mint has entered into a partnership with Montreal-based Enim Technologies to turn e-waste into new coins.
Enim’s process recovers 95% of metals in circuit boards by dunking them in a reusable batch of acids and bases. No toxic waste is produced from their process.
(Source: Sustainablebiz.ca)
Using sheep to manage grass on solar farms
One of the criticisms of solar farms is they are land intensive and use land that could be used for agriculture. But what if you could have the best of both worlds?
Agrivoltaics is a method that uses land for both solar energy production and agriculture by putting sheep to work maintaining grass instead of gas-powered lawnmowers.
The sheep are in big demand with 60 large solar grazing projects in 27 U.S. states.
(Source: The Independent)
This week’s simple living challenge – Scheduling personal downtime
Simplifying life is a big part of living more intentionally. With that in mind, I kicked off the year with 52 ways to simplify your life this year, including a downloadable checklist of weekly tasks.
This week’s challenge is to schedule downtime in our calendars and make it as non-negotiable as any other commitment or appointment. Even in retirement, this is an area I need to improve on.
I’d love to hear what you think about any of this week’s topics. Drop me a comment below and let me know your thoughts and ideas.
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My wife had the same issue, having an email linked to an internet provider. I had long switched mine to accounts like gmail and microsoft outlook because you never know when you might relocate or find a better deal. It never occurred to me to suggest she do the same. Our elderly next door neighbor lost all her saved email over a similar situation. Many internet providers are phasing out their in house email servers so you can be forced to open a new account even if you don’t change providers in some cases. Its a similar hassle to when a credit card gets frauded out. Its murder to go back and figure out how many shopping sites and subscriptions are linked to that card! I’m glad you managed to overcome one of our most vexing first world problems.
I can see our current provider phasing out their email service as they are not supporting it very well.
I definitely still need to go through my saved emails to ensure I keep anything important.
I think a good potato peeler can be life changing! You are so right about our accounts and how everything is intertwined. Good for you for doing that work to sort all of that out! Congratulations!
True about the potato peelers. We’ve had good luck with the ones from IKEA. We bought one somewhere else and it wasn’t the same. My husband gave the new peeler a thumbs up.
I just did a password update not long ago, it was a chore but given that my presence online is minimal, not too stressful. When I still worked everything connected to that was Microsoft and so I had to have Outlook email for “important things”. Dumping that was one of the first things I did after my final day on the job 😉 The infamous “wall”! Very familiar with that. I’m just going to assume nothing or no one is hanging from it in that picture and just focus on how bitterly cold that water looks. I always love your little tidbits of news, like the sheep this week…although now with major shifts down here in the US those sheep may be out of jobs soon along with the energy generated by the farms as that doesn’t fit the ramping up of fossil fuel production ideology now in place 🙁
No-one was hanging from the wall in the picture. The filming seemed to be taking place in the town square last week, although the parking lot near the wall was blocked off so I imagine they’d be filming there at some point.
I hope the US doesn’t lose too much momentum on green energy and the sheep get to keep their jobs.
Goad you got some fresh air. Good idea to turn e-waste into coins.
Yes, and the sun is shining again today and it’s not as cold so I’ll go out for another walk later.
I love how often your posts are in alignment with conversations around the kitchen table here, Michelle. This one — about our far reaching (and out of our control) digital imprints — was a topic just yesterday. I think it’s the vulnerability aspect that’s creating the desire to simplify. Thank you for your post, my friend! 🥰
Serendipity abounds! We are kindred spirits. 🤗 It was odd that Bell locked me out of my email account the day after we’d had the conversation about consolidating and simplifying our services. That was the final straw for me.
Crazy! 😜😉😜