Doing less to do more: Automating your life.

2020 flipped our work and home routines upside down. There were massive layoffs for jobs that required people to show up in person to complete their work. Yet, many in the tech industry who could work from home became busier than ever. This transition further blurred the line of work/life balance.

Prioritizing where you spend your time is more important than ever, but sometimes the decision of what is worth spending time on or not isn't easy.

In order to effectively prioritize your time you need to

1. Understand the value of your time.

2. Start making value based decisions around where you prioritize what you will spend time and money on.

   For more information on 1. & 2. Reference

   Understanding the value of your time

3. Save as much of it as possible using automation.

What is automation anyway? "Automation is a broad term that can cover many areas of technology where human input is minimized

Because the term is so broad, we can use it from anything like creating a chat bot to help you with a question on a website to things as small as clapping to turn on a light (yes the clapper was way ahead of its time and if you lived through the 80's you understand)

For the sake of this article I'm going to focus on automation in two areas to save you time where I've seen dramatic improvements in the last 2 years.

1. Automating your life

2. Automating Basic online tasks for work

Home automation exploded with the introduction of smart home devices like Alexa and Google, but you don't need to have a speaker in your home to have it do things automatically.

Home automation

From turning on my lights the same time as my alarm, adjusting the temperature when I’m within miles of my home, to scheduling a routine to give me a wind-down warning before it shuts off all screens 15 minutes later, home automation makes everything more simple.

• Routines

  • Wake-Up (Lights start to fade in 20 minutes before alarm)

  • Lights (Automated to turn off when not home or when there hasn’t been motion in the room for more than 20 minutes)

  • Cleaning (Hey Alexa, turn on the vacuum while I’m walking the dog)

  • Commute (Google, Tell me which of my normal routes I should take to the office to avoid traffic)

  • Wind down (15 minute warning before lights are dimmed and screens are OFF!)

• List Making

• Notifications

• IFTT (If I am within 1 mile of home turn on the downstairs lamp and adjust the thermostat)

Task automation tools that I use daily:

• Zapier

• IFTT

• Schedulers

• Chrome Extensions

Follow along for a comprehensive overview of my automation setup!