The sounds of the New Year celebration have faded and it’s now back to the daily grind, the memory of champagne and Dick Clark a distant one. Yet one aspect of the New Year lingers: your resolution to eat healthier and hit the gym more. In the process of strengthening your health, why not also take the time to pump up your computer’s security? In fact, just five minutes of simple thought and action can bring positive results right away—unlike the gym!—and protect your private information from spying eyes. All you need to do is make your computer’s password more difficult or add a password if you don’t currently have one.

So what makes a password difficult for hackers and other technological mischief-makers to crack? Try using at least eight characters, a combination of letters and numbers. Make some letters upper case and others lower case. Don’t use any recognizable numbers like your birthday, anniversary, or child’s birthday—numbers that, with a bit of digging, a determined hacker could find easily. Instead choose something you will recall easily—the date you bought the family dog, the time of day your child was born, the first time you went out with that someone special, for instance—but that isn’t easily identifiable. You can even use an acronym for a sentence you make up; for example, “The lazy cow sat on one flower” could be “TlCSo1f.” If you write your password down, don’t keep it in your wallet or purse or near your computer. Instead, put it in a place where only you would think to look.