I have a love/hate relationship with New Year’s Eve that I think a lot of other people share. On the one hand I like an excuse for a fresh start. On the other, I hate to give up old habits. The problem is that giving up old habits isn’t incredibly difficult, but it’s hard, tiresome and exhausting to create new habits. A habit, to be a habit (obviously), requires a lot of repetition, time, and learning.. In particular, I know it can often seem time consuming to learn (and remember!) new technology habits. However, I’m going to give you three fast and easy tips to shape up your technology habits this year.

1. Organize the photos on your PC: You can batch tag photos and more ( use explore.live.com as a resource).
2. Learn a few short-cut keys.
3. Recycle the old stuff.

These three tips will help you to clean up your photo files, speed up your day to day tasks and clear up the clutter. The best part is that none of them require a lot of time, a lot of energy or too much repetition.

#1 Organize the photos on your PC: You can batch tag photos

To tag a person in your photo

1. Double click a photo in Photo Gallery.
2. On the Edit tab, in the Organize group, click Tag and caption, point to People tag, and then click Tag a person.
3. Click the face of the person you want to tag, and either type a name or select one from the list.

To select and tag multiple people

1. On the Home tab, in the Organize group, click Batch people tag. Photo Gallery will compare people tags you've added to other faces in your photos.
2. To confirm a tag suggestion or assign a new people tag to a photo, in the Actions group, click Confirm or Tag as.

#2 Learn A Few Short-Cut Keys

Keyboard short-cut keys can help you save time while working on projects, typing or browsing your PC. While it would take a lot of time to learn all the short-cut keys, just learning a few can really increase your time and productivity. Find out which are the most useful to you here.

#3 Recycle the Old Stuff

If you received a new PC this year or even in the past few years but are still holding onto your old one, you aren’t alone! Many people don’t know where to recycle their old technology and so they simply keep it in a dark dusty closet. To be honest, its simple to recycle. You can recycle most still functioning PCs at one of the Microsoft Store locations. However, there are also other places to recycle that might be closer to your home listed here and most Best Buys will do it!

So, this year, take the challenging of shaping up the technology in your life and find a few extra moments in the day for those other much harder resolutions – like losing those last 10 lbs. Happy 2012 everyone!