Yes, you read that title correctly. Having recently written about widespread password insecurity, I now advise all readers to write their passwords down on a Post-It Note. But I haven’t lost my sanity, nor sold out. There’s more to the story.

Particularly, the line of reasoning follows a great blog post by Sean over at F-Secure. Sean advises his readers to commit this cardinal sin, but the key is a PIN. Namely, when writing down a password, three characters are left out. Those three characters are memorized, and it’s certainly easier to memorize three characters than 10-12. Tack those three characters onto the beginning or the end of your handwritten password, and you then have a functioning authentication token that you didn’t have to fully memorize, while a thief who has your Post-It actually can’t do anything with it.

Now I’ve also blogged about using a decent password safe–software to keep your passwords organized and encrypted. I still claim that’s the way to go, but Sean’s idea is a great one too.