How a Password Manager Enhances Productivity

People who don’t have a password manager often struggle with forgetting their passwords and having to reset them when attempting to log in to their online accounts. This is frustrating,  time-consuming and leads to a loss in productivity. A password manager enhances your productivity since it remembers passwords for you, aids you in generating strong passwords and autofills your login credentials, saving you time to focus on more important tasks. 

Read on to learn five ways a password manager can help you enhance your productivity. 

What is a Password Manager?

A password manager is a cybersecurity tool that aids you in managing and securely storing your passwords.

In addition to storing your login credentials, password managers can store other sensitive information such as credit card numbers and files to make it easier for you to access them whenever you need to. Everything stored in a secure password manager is encrypted at the record level and can only be decrypted by you when you enter your master password. Think of a master password as the key to enter your vault. 

5 Ways a Password Manager Enhances Productivity

Here are a few of the ways a password manager enhances productivity.

Remembers all your passwords for you

At times we may need to log into something quickly and forgetting our passwords can prevent us from being able to access the account we need at the moment we need it. In the workplace, forgetting a password to an account means time must be spent either resetting the password yourself or contacting your IT team to do it for you – which affects their productivity as well.

One of the major benefits of using a password manager is that it saves all your passwords for you. The only password you have to remember is your master password, which is what is used to access your vault. This saves you time from trying to remember passwords for each of your accounts on your own. It also prevents failed login attempts and password resets. 

Generates strong, unique passwords

In today’s digital world, everyone has accounts they must create passwords for and the process of creating them is complicated. The purpose of a password is to protect your accounts from others accessing them. However, relying on yourself to create strong passwords for each of your accounts, while also following password security best practices, is almost impossible to do on your own. 

A strong password is at least 16 characters long and includes uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Coming up with this type of strong password for each of your accounts on your own, that you can also remember, just isn’t realistic. Instead, you can let a password manager do the hard work for you. 

A password manager has a password generator that creates completely random passwords within seconds. When your password is generated and you name your record, you’ll be prompted to save that record in your vault. Once the record is saved, the browser extension will automatically fill your login credentials whenever you go to log in to that account. 

Autofills your login credentials

When browsing online, many people want convenience to enhance productivity. Logging in to accounts manually is seen as an inconvenience for many people, which is why they often result in using their browser’s password manager to autofill their login credentials. However, browser password managers, while convenient, are not safe to use because they can be easily compromised by cybercriminals. 

A standalone password manager offers the same convenience of autofilling your credentials, while also keeping all of them protected, because they adhere to security standards and encrypt all of your stored data. The browser password manager on your computer also may not be available on other computers or your mobile device, meaning you won’t have access to those passwords when you’re at the office or on the go.

Allows you to share passwords with ease

Password sharing is essential at work and in your personal life. However, most password sharing methods like sending passwords through text message or Slack are risky. These sharing methods are vulnerable to being intercepted by cybercriminals and other third parties. When these methods do lead to account compromise, productivity is lost in the process of recovering the account and data that was stolen. 

To ensure no productivity is lost due to insecure password sharing, it’s best to use a password manager to help you in sharing passwords securely with colleagues, family and friends. Good password managers allow you to securely share passwords with anyone, even if they do not use a password manager themself. 

Can save your 2FA codes and autofill them

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is a second form of authentication to your username and password. Some common 2FA methods include the following:

• One-Time Passwords (OTP) such as SMS text message codes
• Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) such as codes generated by an authenticator application
• Biometric authentication such as Face ID
• Security questions

2FA is critical to adding an extra layer of security to your accounts. However, most people think of 2FA as inconvenient because of the extra step it takes to log in to an account with 2FA enabled. A good password manager solves this inconvenience with integrated 2FA codes. Instead of having to manually retrieve your 2FA code, your password manager will autofill it for you – removing that extra step and saving you time.

Having a password manager autofill your 2FA codes also removes the risk associated with having codes sent through SMS text message, which is considered to be one of the least secure 2FA methods. 

Should I Get a Password Manager?

If you wish to secure your accounts and manage your passwords better to increase your online productivity, then yes, you would benefit from getting a password manager.

Password managers are extremely useful when securing your online accounts. Many cybersecurity experts recommend password managers to strengthen your online presence and reduce the risk of cybercriminals gaining access to your accounts due to poor password habits. 

Users often rely on themselves to create their own passwords, which results in weak passwords and the reuse of variations of the same passwords across multiple accounts. This is a dangerous practice as it can lead to account compromise and result in your sensitive data being leaked or used for malicious purposes. 

How to choose the right password manager

Here are a few of the features we recommend you look out for when choosing a password manager.

• Zero-knowledge security: Zero knowledge is a security model in which no one but the user can access that user’s data. When a password manager is zero knowledge, the user’s data is encrypted and decrypted at the device level – meaning data is decrypted locally on the user’s device and no one else is able to see it. Only users have the means to decrypt the contents of their vault with their master password, which means that even if the provider is breached, end-user data is not compromised.
• Encryption: Encryption is what turns readable data into cipher text (unreadable data). A good password manager encrypts all contents in the user’s vault in transit and at-rest including usernames, passwords, email addresses, URLs and other metadata.
• Multi-device use: A good password manager works cross-platform including on mobile devices, tablets and PCs. The password manager you’re considering should work across all your devices, otherwise, it isn’t as convenient to you.

Along with the above features, we recommend you read through reviews to see what others are saying about different password management solutions.

Increase Your Productivity With a Password Manager

Without a password manager, productivity is wasted trying to remember passwords and resetting them every time you forget them. Keeper Password Manager is a zero-trust and zero-knowledge password manager. To see how Keeper Password Manager can help enhance your productivity, start a free 30-day trial today.