The stack of paper on your desk keeps growing, the file folder is bursting at the seams, and at some point you make the decision: from now on, everything goes digital. A few weeks later, the stack is growing again – and your guilty conscience right along with it.

The problem is almost never the technology. It’s the sorting.

Every day we type addresses that start with three letters almost nobody thinks about: www. They have become as ordinary as the light switch on the wall.

And yet none of it existed a little over 35 years ago – and the idea behind it was born not in a tech company, but in a physics lab.

Photos used to sit in shoeboxes up in the attic, where they survived for decades. Today thousands of pictures live on a smartphone – and, paradoxically, they are more at risk than the old paper prints ever were.

Why is that – and what can you do about it?

You open a document, change a line and click the little square icon at the top left. Saved. What you just clicked on is the stylized image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk – an object most adults haven’t held in their hands for twenty years.

When was the last time you actually held a floppy disk?

After two years, your phone barely makes it through half a day. Frustrating — and seemingly unavoidable. Friends and family then trot out the same old advice: drain it completely before charging, never leave it plugged in overnight, and whatever you do, don’t fast-charge it.

The trouble is: most of that isn’t true anymore. And some of it actively damages your battery.