How do you balance the necessity of highly secure passwords with the utility of easily recalling them all?

This post originally appeared on theBuffer blog.

It’s a question I mull each and every time a security breach happens.

It’s still on my to-do list.

Does this sound like you?

The rest of us are still searching for a solution.

It took writing this post to get me on the straight-and-narrow with my passwords.

Here’s what I learned about how to create a secure password you’re free to remember.

Avoid names, places, and dictionary words.

Mix it up.Use variations on capitalization, spelling, numbers, and punctuation.

These three rules make it exponentially harder for hackers to crack your password.

This guessing strategy quickly breaks about two-thirds of all passwords.

Recent password breaches at sites like Adobehave shown how insecure many of our passwords are.

Here is a list of the most common passwords that turned up in the Adobe breach.

It probably goes without saying: Avoid using these passwords.

Here are four methods to try.

It works like this:Take a sentence and turn it into a password.

The sentence can be anything personal and memorable for you.

Take the words from the sentence, then abbreviate and combine them in unique ways to form a password.

Here are four sample sentences that I put together.

WOO!TPwontSB = Woohoo!

The Packers won the Super Bowl!

PPupmoarT@O@tgs = kindly pick up more Toasty O’s at the grocery store.

1tubuupshhh…imj = I tuck button-up shirts into my jeans.

W?ow?imp::ohth3r = Where oh where is my pear?

Enter Electrum.The Electrum wallet offers a 12-word seedthat lets you access all your Bitcoin addresses.

The seed serves as a master password for your Bitcoins.

Instead of a difficult-to-remember string of characters, you’re free to make a lengthy phrase instead.

It’s as simple as it sounds.Come up with 12 random words.

Just see to it it isnot a simple phrase or a phrase taken from existing literature.

The PAO Method

Memorization techniques and mnemonic devices might help you remember an unbreakable password.

Select a photo of a familiar or famous person (Beyonce).

Imagine some random action along with a random object (Beyonce driving a Jello mold at Mount Rushmore).

My method relies on a couple of helpful remembering devices: Phonetics and muscle memory.

Here’s how it works:

Go to arandom password generator site.

For example: drEnaba5Et (doctor enaba 5 E.T.)

or BragUtheV5 (brag you the V5).

The easy-to-key in passwords tend to get stuck in my muscle memory quicker.

Keep the phonetic, muscle-memory passwords.

Print out your text file with password keepers.

One at a time, change your passwords on your most-commonly-used websites.

I still remember passwords from years ago based on this method.

I imagine a lot of folks get hung up on this part.

Creating and remembering a unique password is challenging on its own, much less doing it multiple times.

I seem to sign up at a new website or service once per day.

This is where the question of security versus usability really hits home for me.

Fortunately, there are a number of different approaches you might take to solving this conundrum.

These tools will store your passwords for you (and even provide random new passwords when needed).

All you better do is remember a single master password that grants you access to the stored data.

key in your master password once, and the password management tool does the rest.

Some of thesepassword management toolsintegrate nicely within your online window or even on a mobile equipment.

Use original ones for important sites like email, Facebook, Twitter, and banks.

Use a common (but hard to crack) password for all the less important spots.

Your all-important email, social, and money accounts will be safe, which is great.

Hybrid Method: Password Management Plus Memorization

What if you mixed the two methods?

Memorize passwords for your most important and most frequently used tools and use LastPass or 1Password for the rest.

Image adapted fromDVARG(Shutterstock) andZeana(Pixabay).

Photos byDanielSTL(Flickr),Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier(Flickr), andJ Brew(Flickr).

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