Automate the Boring Stuff

Today's article is less about professional development and career growth and more about winning back some time and reducing some of your cognitive load through better use of tools readily around you - which should lead to winning back some sanity in the day-over-day craziness. These are my notes, from automation and efficiency steps I use regularly.

Hopefully, none of these are shocking discoveries to you. If any of them are, leave a comment about which one you found new. On the other hand, if you have some other tips you stand by and recommend broadly, do let me know those as well!

House & Lifestyle Automations

Let Your Voice Assistant Handle More Than Just the Weather

Instead of manually flipping switches, adjusting thermostats, or reminding yourself about car maintenance, let your voice assistant do the heavy lifting. With a little setup, you can say, “Good morning” and have your lights turn on, the coffee maker start brewing, and today’s reminders read aloud. At the other end of your workday - I use a "Check out" shortcut when starting for home from work, that takes my phone off silent mode, sends a text home that I am on my way, and brings up the Long Island Railroad timetable with the next set of trains to aim for. Invest in learning the best use of custom workflows on your devices (Apple Shortcuts for example). Chances are, once you know how to use these, you will be able to find someone else's automation script that does a lot of what you need done - and then customize your way through the rest. It's a good idea to learn the details anyway, as these low-key automations break often when the underlying applications change.

A natural extension of this approach - set automated alerts for everything that happens on a schedule. Car maintenance and home upkeep—like oil changes, HVAC filter swaps, or even garbage day—so you never miss a thing.

Spend 30 minutes setting up routines and reminders, and you’ll save at least five minutes a day, adding up to over 30 hours a year of reduced daily friction.

Stop Worrying About Bills—Automate Them Instead

Manually paying bills each month is tedious and unnecessary. Automate your mortgage, utilities, credit cards, and insurance payments so they happen in the background while you focus on bigger things. Pair this with a budgeting app that categorizes your spending automatically, and you’ll always know where your money is going without spending hours balancing spreadsheets. For bills that can't be automated - for example, medical bills that come in the mail - use an app like Papaya Pay that can take a photo of the bill and send a payment on your behalf, without needing to manually set up each payee.

A one-time setup of 30 minutes can eliminate 15 minutes of bill-paying stress each week, saving 13 hours a year—not to mention avoiding late fees.

Your Lawn and Plants Will Water Themselves

Watering the garden or remembering to keep houseplants alive shouldn’t take up mental space. Smart irrigation systems and soil moisture sensors can detect when your plants actually need water and do the work for you. Whether it’s a lawn that only gets watered when necessary or indoor planters that self-regulate moisture, you’ll avoid overwatering, underwatering, and wasting time. Smart sprinkler controllers get weather information and your settings of which zone has what kind of plants, to come up with an optimal watering routine that saves water and also lets your plants thrive.

Setting up a system takes 30–60 minutes, but once it’s running, it’ll save you 15 minutes a day, adding up to over 90 hours per year—or more than two full work weeks.

A Smarter Thermostat Means One Less Thing to Think About

No more constantly adjusting the temperature every time the weather changes. Smart thermostats learn your habits and keep your home comfortable while saving energy. They can even detect when no one is home and adjust accordingly. Your electricity or natural gas provider may even have a marketplace (examples- PSEG marketplace, National Grid marketplace) that offers these at deep discounts, as these devices make the utilities run more efficiently. As a cherry on top - some even give you cash incentives for having the ability to reduce summer cooling or winter heating in peak surge periods.

After a 30-minute setup, you’ll no longer waste 5–10 minutes a day adjusting temperatures, adding up to 30–60 hours saved per year—plus lower energy bills.

Batch Cooking: Your Future Self Will Thank You

Cooking from scratch every single night eats up time, but batch cooking on the weekends can save you hours during the week. With just a few hours on a Sunday, you can prep and portion meals for the next five days, reducing weeknight cooking to simple reheating. I'd rather smoke a good 6-10lb brisket for 8 hours on a weekend than eat a whole week of sandwiches off it.

This habit saves at least 20–30 minutes a night, adding up to over 100 hours a year—or more than four full days of cooking stress eliminated.

Never Overpay Again—Let Price Watchers Do the Work

Tracking price drops manually is inefficient, but automation tools can do it for you. Whether you’re shopping for flights, big-ticket purchases, or everyday essentials, price-tracking apps alert you when it’s the best time to buy. A quick 10-minute setup on sites like Google Flights, Honey, or CamelCamelCamel can save you an hour or more per month, adding up to 12+ hours a year—along with hundreds of dollars in savings. Be careful on this one - there's a deal somewhere on something every minute of every day, and "spending money to save money" is a slippery slope.

Spend Less Time Maintaining Your Tech & Stuff

Your Photos and Files Should Back Themselves Up

Ever lost an important photo or document because you forgot to back it up? Set up cloud storage for your phone’s photos and sync important files to a service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud. For extra security, use a local backup on an external hard drive or NAS (network-attached storage). Learn the basics of using command line sync jobs (robocopy) for more control in your backup jobs, and learn how to hook up an external hard disk directly to your router so the entire household can use that as a local backup. Leverage your Prime benefits of unlimited full-resolution photo backups. Go true hybid cloud + multi-cloud on this one- leverage Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, Amazon, Google, DropBox, plus local, so you have unparalleled redundancy. You'll have to balance your monthly service costs to decide which solution backs up what type of digital assets.

A 10-minute setup ensures that your memories and work are always safe, saving you at least 10 minutes a week that you’d otherwise spend manually moving files—adding up to over 8.5 hours per year of peace of mind.

Stop Babysitting Your Computer with Automated Updates

No one enjoys dealing with software updates, but ignoring them leads to slow performance, security risks, and unexpected crashes. Enable automatic updates for your operating system, apps, and antivirus software so you never have to think about it. Most devices already support scheduled updates while you sleep, and enabling this takes just 5 minutes. Better yet - learn one good combination of using Microsoft's Winget for Windows and save it as a shortcut, setting it to run as an administrator, on your desktop. My favorite:

winget.exe upgrade --all --include-unknown --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements        

In return, you’ll save about 10 minutes per week—or 8.5 hours a year—that would otherwise be spent clicking "remind me later" and troubleshooting outdated software.

Stock Up on the Little Things That Always Go Missing

How much time do you waste searching for a phone charger, a pen, or a notebook? Instead of constantly hunting for these everyday essentials, buy extras and keep them in all the right places—one in the car, one at work, one in each room where you might need it. Find out your personal sweet spot in price - i.e. how much should an item cost, at most, to not make it worth your time to go look for one in another room. I set this at about $10, which is enough to cover the things I mentioned earlier- pens, writing materials, phone chargers, and battery packs. Headphones can also come into this category when you leverage deals - so you have one pair in each of your favorite places to sit around the house.

A 15-minute planning session and one quick shopping click can save at least 5 minutes a day of unnecessary searching—adding up to over 30 hours per year of stress-free convenience.

Set It and Forget It: Auto-Restock Your Consumables

Running out of toilet paper, coffee, or dish soap always seems to happen at the worst time. Instead of last-minute grocery store runs, subscribe to automatic restocking for household essentials through services like Amazon Subscribe & Save, Target Subscriptions, or your local grocery store’s delivery plan. My trick on this is to limit it to only the consumables that you won't consume any faster if you had more around. For example, I did a subscribe & save on Bermuda rum cakes from Amazon - was not my brightest decision (albeit ridiculously delicious). On the other hand - subscriptions on water filter refills and toothbrush refills are beyond amazing, completely offloading it from my cognitive load yet establishing a cadence in keeping them maintained.

A 10-minute setup can save you 20 minutes per week avoiding last-minute store trips, adding up to 17+ hours per year—and that’s time you can spend on something way more enjoyable than standing in a checkout line.

Never Dig Through a Pile of Receipts Again

Whether it’s for tax deductions, reimbursements, or just tracking spending, paper receipts create clutter and are a pain to sort through. Use an app like Expensify, Shoeboxed, Scanner Pro, or even your phone’s camera to scan and store receipts automatically, making them searchable whenever you need them. Link these to the cloud backup strategy mentioned above. Paper is heavy and delicate to maintain - the less you have to keep around you the better.

Setting this up takes just 10 minutes, and by eliminating 15 minutes a week of sorting and organizing paper receipts, you’ll save 13+ hours per year—not to mention the frustration of digging through a shoebox full of crumpled paper.

Make Your Smart Gadgets Do More for You

Never Reset a Password Again

How many times have you hit “Forgot Password” this year? A password manager like 1Password, LastPass, or Bitwarden remembers everything for you, automatically filling in logins across your devices. It also generates secure passwords so you’re not using “password123” everywhere. Most of them also monitor the dark web and other nefarious places for password leaks, and alert you on what needs changing. Also, they free you from a single device that remembers your passwords - transparently move from your phone to tablet to laptop to desktop and have the peace of mind that your logins will still get filled with the right passwords. As long as we have to deal with passwords, best to deal as little as you can. On a related note - kudos to all the services and websites that are moving to passwordless authentication.

Spend 15 minutes setting it up, and you’ll never waste 10 minutes a week searching for or resetting passwords again—that’s over 8.5 hours per year of regained sanity.

Type Less, Say More with Text Expansion

Stop typing the same things over and over. Whether it’s your email address, home address, or common responses, text expansion tools (like TextExpander or built-in shortcuts on your phone) let you type short codes that expand into full sentences. For example ;addr can expand to your home address, or hny can expand into a nicely worded new year greeting. Pick something you won't normally type as the expansion works as brute force without understanding context.

A quick 5-minute setup saves you 5–10 minutes a week, adding up to 4–8+ hours per year of effortless communication.

Let Smart Reminders and To-Do Lists Handle the Details

Instead of keeping everything in your head, let a to-do app (like Todoist, Google Tasks, or Apple Reminders) remember recurring tasks for you. Set reminders for bill payments, doctor appointments, anything you can't do right this moment and need to maintain in your head for bubbling up at the right future moment. Combine with an Eisenhower Matrix setup if you have a list that's too long and you need to sort across urgency vs importance.

With just 10 minutes of setup, you’ll avoid 15 minutes per week of mental juggling, freeing up 13 hours per year—plus, you’ll never miss an important deadline.

Stay Informed Without Doomscrolling

If you constantly check multiple news sites, blogs, or podcasts, consolidate them into one place. Use Feedly or Pocket to curate your must-read articles and set up auto-downloads for podcasts and audiobooks. They also allow you to keep offline copies of web articles you can't read right this moment, and keeping interesting things saved as you come across them means you don't risk losing it to the eternal scroll (and then waste time thinking up the right search keywords).

A 10-minute setup means you’ll spend 20 fewer minutes per week aimlessly browsing, adding up to 17+ hours per year—all while staying informed on your own schedule.

Keep Your Family on the Same Page with Shared Lists and Calendars

No more forgotten grocery items or missed appointments. A shared family calendar (Google Calendar, Cozi) and collaborative shopping and to-do apps (OurGroceries, AnyList) ensure everyone knows what’s happening and what’s needed. AnyList also allows categorization by store, so we can separate out our warehouse store list from our day-to-day top-up grocery lists.

After a 15–30 minute setup, you’ll save 10 minutes a day not texting back and forth about schedules and shopping lists, adding up to 60+ hours per year—the equivalent of an entire weekend vacation.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Life is filled with small, repetitive tasks that quietly eat away at our time and energy—time that could be spent with family, on hobbies, or simply unwinding. The good news? A little bit of automation can go a long way in making everyday life smoother, smarter, and far less stressful.

Looking back at the list, which of these ideas stood out to you? Were any new or surprising? Maybe you’re already using some or most of these automations, but is there one you hadn’t thought about that you’re now excited to try? Or maybe you have a favorite automation trick that I missed—what’s something you do that saves you time and makes life easier?

Let’s keep the conversation going—share your thoughts, and let’s help each other spend less time on the boring stuff and more time on what really matters.