Millions of people are doing Dry January right now.
They're cutting the one thing they know isn't good for them because they want to feel better, work better, and stop pretending "I'll start Monday" is a plan.
Your business has a Dry January list too.
It's just made of tech habits instead of cocktails.
You know the ones. Everyone knows they're risky or inefficient. Everyone still does them because "it's fine" and "we're busy."
Until it's not fine.
Here are six bad tech habits to quit cold turkey this month, and what to do instead.
Habit #1: Clicking "Remind Me Later" on Updates
That little button has done more damage to small businesses than any hacker ever could.
We get it. Nobody wants a restart in the middle of the day. But those updates aren't just adding features; they're often patching security holes that hackers are actively exploiting.
"Later" turns into weeks. Weeks turn into months. And now you're running software with known vulnerabilities that criminals already have the keys to.
Things like the WannaCry ransomware attack crippled businesses worldwide. How? It exploited a vulnerability that Microsoft had patched two months earlier. Every victim had clicked "remind me later" one too many times.
The cost… companies in more than 150 countries lost billions as business ground to a halt.
Quit it: Schedule updates for end of day or let your IT partner push them in the background. No drama. No surprise resets. No open doors for attackers.
Habit #2: The One Password That Works Everywhere
You've got a favorite password.
It "meets requirements." It feels strong. It's easy to remember. And you use it everywhere: email, banking, Amazon, your accounting software, that random industry forum you signed up for three years ago.
Here's the problem: Data breaches happen constantly. That random forum? Its database got leaked last year, and your email-password combination is now on a list being sold to hackers for pennies.
They don't have to guess your banking password. They already have it. They just try it everywhere and see what opens.
This is called credential stuffing, and it's responsible for a staggering percentage of account breaches. Your "strong" password is a master key, and someone else has a copy.
Quit it: Password manager. Full stop. LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden. Pick one. You remember one master password; it generates and remembers unique, complex passwords for everything else. Setup takes a few minutes. Peace of mind lasts forever.
Habit #3: Sharing Passwords Over Text or Email
"Hey, can you send me the login for the shared account?"
"Sure! It's admin@company.com, password is Summer2024!"
Sent via Slack, or text, or email. Problem solved in 30 seconds.
Except now that message lives forever.
In your sent folder. In their inbox. Backed up to the cloud. Searchable. Forwardable. If anyone's email gets compromised ever, the attacker can search for "password" and harvest every credential your team has ever shared.
It's like writing your house key on a postcard and mailing it.
Quit it: Password managers have secure sharing features; use them. The recipient gets access without ever seeing the actual password. It can be revoked anytime. No permanent record floating around in email archives. If you absolutely must share manually, split credentials across channels and change the password immediately after.
Habit #4: Making Everyone an Admin Because "It's Easier"
Someone needed to install something once. Or change the setting. Rather than figure out the specific permission they needed, you just made them an admin.
Now half your team has full admin rights because it was faster than doing it properly.
Here's what admin access means: They can install software, disable security tools, change critical settings, delete important files. And if their credentials get phished? The attacker gets all those powers too.
Ransomware particularly loves admin accounts. More access = more damage, faster.
Giving everyone admin rights is like giving everyone keys to the safe because one person once needed a stapler.
Quit it: Principle of least privilege: People get access to exactly what they need, nothing more. Yes, it takes a few more minutes to set up proper permissions. That's a tiny investment compared to the cost of a breach, or a well-meaning employee who accidentally deletes a critical folder.
Habit #5: "Temporary" Fixes That Became Permanent
Something broke. You found a workaround. "We'll fix it properly later."
That was 2019.
The workaround is now just "how we do things."
Sure, it takes three extra steps. Sure, everyone must remember the trick. But the job gets done. Why fix what's not broken?
Because those three extra steps, multiplied by everyone who does them, multiplied by every day, equals a staggering amount of lost productivity.
But worse: Workarounds create fragility. They depend on specific conditions, specific software versions, specific people who remember the trick. When something changes — and something always changes — the whole thing collapses. And nobody remembers how to fix it properly because you never did.
Quit it: Make a list of workarounds your team uses. Just the list. Don't try and fix it yourself, because if you could do that, you would have already. Instead, take the easy route and let us help you fix them once and for all and eliminate frustration and save you and your team time.
Habit #6: The Spreadsheet That Runs Your Entire Business
You know the one.
One Excel file. Twelve tabs. A ridiculous formula chain that nobody fully understands. Three people know how it works. One of them created it and no longer works here.
If that file corrupts, what's the backup plan? If the person who understands it quits, who maintains it?
That spreadsheet is a single point of failure wearing a green hat.
Spreadsheets have no easy audit trail. If someone accidentally deletes a row, you'll never know what was lost. They don't scale. They don't integrate with other tools. They're almost never backed up properly. You've built a critical business system on digital duct tape.
Quit it: Document what that spreadsheet actually does. Not the file itself, but the business processes it supports. Then look for actual tools built for those purposes. CRM for customer tracking. Inventory software for inventory. Scheduling tools for schedules. These have backups, audit trails, user permissions, and don't depend on one person's arcane knowledge. Spreadsheets are great tools. They're awful platforms.
Why These Habits Are So Hard to Break
You already knew most of these were bad ideas.
You're not uninformed; you're busy. That's the real issue.
Bad tech habits persist because:
- The consequences are invisible until they're catastrophic. Reusing passwords works perfectly until the day it doesn't. Then you find out all at once.
- The "right way" feels slower in the moment. Setting up a password manager takes a few hours. Typing the password you've memorized takes three seconds. The math seems obvious until you factor in the cost of a breach and destroying your reputation.
- Everyone else does it too. When the whole team shares passwords via Slack, it doesn't feel like a risk. It feels normal. Normalizing bad behavior makes it invisible.
This is exactly why Dry January works for some people. It forces awareness. It breaks the autopilot. It makes the invisible visible.
How to Actually Quit (Without Relying on Willpower)
Willpower doesn't work for Dry January.
Environment does.
Same with business tech.
The businesses that actually break these habits don't do it through discipline. They do it by changing their environment, so the right behavior becomes the easy behavior:
- Password managers get deployed companywide, so sharing credentials insecurely isn't even an option.
- Updates get pushed automatically, so there's no "remind me later" button to click.
- Permissions get managed centrally, so nobody's handing out admin rights as a shortcut.
- Workarounds get replaced with real solutions that don't require tribal knowledge.
- Critical spreadsheets get migrated to proper systems with backups and access controls.
The right way becomes the easy way. The bad habits become harder than the good ones.
That's what a good IT partner does. Not lecture you about what you should be doing; they actually change the systems, so the right behavior is the default.
Ready to Quit the Habits That Are Quietly Hurting Your Business?
Book a Bad Habit Audit.
In just 15 minutes, we’ll learn about your business, the problems you have, and give you a roadmap to fix them forever.
No judgment. No jargon. Just a cleaner, safer, faster, more profitable 2026.
Schedule your 15-minute discovery call here
Because some habits are worth quitting cold turkey.
And January's a good time to start.
