What would we do without technology? Probably sleep a little better, look at people when we talk to them, and not have cricks in our necks from texting. But I digress. It's a necessary part of life these days, so we have to learn how to make it manageable! Introducing a new series called Taming Your Tech. Each month, we'll dive into a new bite-size assignment to help master your digital world.

On to Step 1...

Floppy Disks. Yes, seriously. Locate every single floppy disk in your home. Don't have any? Then congrats...you've completed step one! For the rest of you, there are mysteries hiding on these little pieces of plastic that we have to solve before we can move forward. These disks might contain nothing or they might contain your master's thesis that you spent countless hours on. We don't want to risk losing the important stuff! So head right on over to Amazon and pick up one of these gems: an external floppy disk reader. There are tons of options, but this one is under $10 and can arrive at your door in two days if you have Amazon Prime (Hint: you should have Amazon Prime. Trust me).

Fast forward a few days...Let's do this.

Get comfy with your computer, your random floppy disks, your external reader, some good music, and a big ol' cup of coffee.
Plug in the drive, grab your first disk, and pop it in.
Open the folder that contains the disk's files and check out what's on it.
If it's something unimportant, delete it.
If it's something you want to keep, move or copy the document over to your computer. Go ahead and move it into a digital folder or make a generic "from floppy disks - to be filed" folder if you don't have a good organizational system yet. We'll get to that soon!
After all the files have been moved, delete the files from the disk. The goal is to have an empty floppy disk by the end of this process so no confidential information remains on it.
Trash the now-empty disk. If you want to be extra careful (I hear ya, I do too), dismantle the disk by prying open the plastic housing and take a pair of scissors to the magnetic disk. Totally unusable, unreadable, unworry-able.
Repeat for all the disks.
Celebrate! Step one is complete!

Next up...what to do with mystery CDs & DVDs.