The Automated Life: How to Get Machines and Software to Do Most of Your Work

Note: Like so many resource posts, this one is open to feedback, changes, additions, and edits.

Real talk: no matter how old we get, we always dream of having a house like Tony Stark. We want to talk to our centralized robot like we’re Jean-Luc Picard telling the computer to play some cool jazz. We want our alarm clock to activate our bacon cooker and put two eggs on the skillet.

Are we dreaming? Kind of, but not really.

It’s 2015, after all. We don’t have flying cars, but we live in the futuristic wonderland Marty McFly and Doc Brown stumbled onto in Back to the Future Part II. We have an Internet. We don’t have robots like this but we have bots, dammit, and that means some serious home and lifestyle automation is within our reach. Hell, I don’t even have to post the weekly field report post - a bot does that for me.

If you do everything manually, there are ways to smoothen out your lifestyle with the aid of smartphones, bots, software, and more.

Delegating Menial Tasks

Automating your lifestyle doesn’t necessarily require robots - you can hire real people to do things for you when you don’t want to do them. You can hire virtual assistants to handle your email, your scheduling, and more.

• TaskRabbit - have people run your errands for you (more likely if you live in a major city).
• FancyHands.com - A virtual assistance company that you can simply text and they’ll assign someone to do something for you, like talk to your cable company or buy your mom a Mother’s Day gift.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk - Crowdsourced work; you post a task and people who want online virtual assistance work will jump on it.

Sites like Elance, Zirtual, Upwork, and more have all sorts of virtual assistants willing to do your menial tasks for very little modest pay. Sometimes, you can score a free trial just to test out the lifestyle and see if it’s for you - I highly recommend at least doing that.

Automated Trigger Systems

This is something I’m just getting into. The basic formula is, you can set a bot to work on a basic “cause-effect” rule. “If this happens, then do this.” For example, “if I post a picture to Instagram, automatically save it to Dropbox.” If you have enough smart electronics like Phillips Hue in your life, you can even get as advanced as “when it rains, set my lights to blue” or “when someone emails me, blink the lights twice.”

• IFTTT.com is by far your most prevalent option, working on smartphones to do just about anything. I recommend browsing their “recipes” to see what amazing things people do to automate their life.
• Zapier.com is basically the same thing, but for PC-based people with old-ass cell phones.

This should solve most of your “Tony Stark” quandaries. But if you still want someone to talk to, you can always check out the Amazon Echo.

Home and Entertainment

There are a lot of creative ways you can streamline and automate your home:

• Plex organizes your home media life into one single software resource.
• Lifehacker has a lot of posts about DIY home automation, if you’re into DIY.
• Set up various Amazon Subscribe purchases to automate buying shaving supplies, toiletries, and the like. Stop having to run to Walgreens.
• Set up automatic bill paying, especially if you’re on top of your finances and you always know you’ll have enough at the end of the month.
• Ask Eat This Much what you should eat today by feeding it your diet goals and watching what it comes up with.
• Use a WeMo Maker to add WiFi to just about any device. This can be the “missing link” into the automated life you’ve been looking for; pair it with IFTTT and you can set things like “turn off my lights at sunset.” Or you can program your sprinklers not to go off when rain is in the forecast. WeMo home automation in general is worth checking out.
• The Wink Hub is another option for enabling home automation via wifi.

Password Security

I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice and have learned a lesson along the way.

• Check out Lifehacker’s Guide to a “Nearly Hack Proof Password System” that utilizes a thumb drive as additional security.
• AVG is an easy anti-virus and anti-malware program. It’s free, runs smoothly in the background, and I don’t even notice when it’s doing the weekly scan I assigned it.
• KeePass is a nice password security system. You can create a password database and save it remotely to Dropbox so that you don’t have to worry about your computer crashing.

Keys to Automation

• Don’t create new tasks just to automate them. Look instead to remove tasks from your life. Think like /r/minimalism and don’t add anything unnecessary; just hack away at what you already do until you find that you have to do very little except your basic work.
• Cut down. It’s hard to automate your life if you have 5 different email accounts. Cut down on them and get used to one or two sources for your daily life. Be the guy capable of waking up, checking one account to see if there’s anything new, and going about his day.
• Use pre-existing features - for example, Facebook emails you when you have a new alert. So check your email in the morning instead of your Facebook, because your email will have everything you need. Look to create a “funnel” that makes your life smoother.
• Take one day and write down the tasks you don’t like doing. These are the ones you’ll look to automate. Strive to find a software solution first…if there isn’t one, you can outsource it to a virtual assistant.
• Don’t DIY. Chances are if you have something you want to automate, there’s an app for it. And if not, IFTTT can probably take care of it.