Life can be so unpleasant sometimes. You have to come up with food every day, remember things like medication or daily appointments, and who wants to keep track of when your car has to check in?
The reality is that life is about organizing, remembering things and completing tasks. The more things you can automate on your computer, mobile phone, and smart home devices, the less worry you have to worry about. And less anxiety means a simpler life without stress.
In this article, we’re going to explore the most common areas of life where people forget or are just too tired to complete tasks, and how you can take advantage of automation to get rid of these things. Mostly automate boring things. Also, be sure to check out our tips for automating an idle computer.
Meal planning, shopping and cooking
What could take longer than planning a meal each week, shopping for groceries, and having to prepare all those meals? Wouldn’t it be nice to completely automate the boring meal planning and shopping list part of this process?
If you search the Internet, you will find that there are actually a number of apps and websites that will automatically draw up a meal plan for you and email you everything you need to buy to make those meals. Just print the letter, take it to the grocery store, and you have everything you need for a week off work.
Eat This Much is one such site.
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When you first sign up, the site will guide you through a quick questionnaire that asks for statistics on your health and your eating habits.
This profile even includes a smart quiz where you can vote for or against a specific number of products that you like or dislike.
This helps the app to tailor dishes to your liking.
When you’re done, the web app will schedule meals for the entire week. You can access them on the website, or ask the service to send you a complete meal plan and grocery list weekly by email.
Keep in mind that Eat This Much requires a premium account to automatically send emails, so if you’re looking to save some money, you might consider looking for other services that do the same.
Here are a few other options for automating meal planning and grocery listing:
- Plan To Eat
- Zelish
- Swole.me (free)
- Fitness Meal Plan
Remember your medication and other things
Tired of remembering everything you need to remember every day? Take the medicine several times a day. Feed the pets or walk them several times a day. Go to bed at a reasonable time every night.
The days are full of things to remember. So why not automate boring tasks and free your mind for more important tasks?
A great way to do this is to use your favorite to-do list app. Be sure to select an app or service that has recurring reminders. In this example, we will be using ToDoist
1. If you want to do something like this in ToDoist, create a new task and be sure to schedule it. ToDoist understands natural language, so when you select a Schedule under a new task, you can enter something like “every morning at 8 amâ€.
ToDoist will figure this out and assign the task Sunday through Saturday at 8:00 am.
2. Then select the task you want to edit and click the Reminders icon (in the form of an alarm). Set the value to 0 min so that the reminder appears the moment you schedule a task every day.
3. Finally, go to ToDoist Settings and select Reminders from the left menu. Make sure all three types of notifications are selected under How do you want to receive reminders. This ensures that you receive desktop, email, and mobile notifications when the reminder appears.
For mobile notifications to work, make sure you have the todo app installed on your mobile phone.
Never miss appointments
Tired of forgetting important appointments due to too many things to do on your day? You may not be using the tools at your disposal well. One of the most common tools that can help you with this is Google Calendar
It might seem like an obvious solution, but too many people use Google Calendar manually instead of setting up automatic settings to automate all recurring appointments throughout the week.
Let’s see how to do this.
For this example, let’s say you want to make sure you schedule your gym workout every day at noon.
1. Open Google Calendar and select noon on any day of the week to make an appointment.
2. Enter a name for the meeting. You will see that the time has already been set and the default is 1 hour. You can change this if you need more time to train.
3. Select “Do not repeat” in the time settings. This will open a dropdown window for repeating time settings. Select the frequency with which the meeting will repeat. In this case, you want to train every weekday at noon, so select Every Weekday (Monday through Friday).
4. Finally, in the Add Location field, select Add Notification. Set the value to 0 minutes to receive notifications exactly when the appointment was made. If you want to give yourself time to go somewhere, consider extending that time by 20 or 30 minutes.
5. Finally, go to your Google Calendar settings, select Event Settings from the left menu, and under Notifications, change desktop notifications to Alerts to receive alerts to your mobile phone about these Google Calendar reminders.
Make sure you have installed the Google Calendar app for Android or iOS to receive these notifications on your mobile device.
Save energy with a smart, scheduled home
The best way to automate your life is to purchase smart home devices. The reason for this is that almost all smart home devices have the ability to create schedules.
One example is WeMo devices. For example, WeMo switches include the ability to add rules to every switch you own.
So, if you have a switch or plug connected to a light or lamp, you can save electricity by automating the switching on and off of those lamps.
In fact, many of these smart home apps let you use your location to turn lights on at dusk and off at dawn. Or, if you want to schedule lights or other devices to turn on or off at specific times of the day, you can do that too.
Leave behind the days when your family keeps lights on. Replace old switches and plugs with smart devices and you can save a huge amount of money on your energy bills. You also need to remember to walk around the house and turn off all those energy-wasting lights.
If you want to save even more energy, get a smart thermostat like Nest or Ecobee.
Clean up your email inbox
Tired of your growing mailbox and no time to clean it up? This can be automated too. Most email services include filters with which you can identify emails over a certain age. Gmail is no exception.
If you have a Gmail account, you can automatically delete emails that are older than a certain age (when you received emails) using a filter.
To do this:
1. Open your Gmail preferences and select Filters & Blocked Addresses from the menu.
2. In the Filters section, select Create New Filter.
3. In the pop-up filter window, in the Has words box, type old_than: xxd. You can replace xx with any number and d with any time interval, such as “m” for months or “y” for years. Select Create Filter to continue.
4. In the next window select “Delete” and then select “Create Filter”.
Now all emails older than the period you specified will be automatically deleted. You no longer have to worry about cleaning up your inbox because Gmail takes care of it for you.
Note. Remember, your emails will be deleted no matter who they are from. If you have something important that you want to keep, you will need to export these emails before the time-out and they will be deleted.
Automate your budget
Are you sometimes late with paying your bills because you just forgot to pay your bill? There is no excuse for this these days. Almost every company offers an automatic payment option.
All it takes is to log into the account as usual when you pay these bills and find the Auto Pay option available.
It is recommended that you subscribe to these services. Obviously, you need to make sure you have a budget where you can pay all your bills. If you don’t, you will have to consider cutting back on subscriptions and services, so this is not an option.
You should also automate your investment in any retirement savings you may have. Retirement is something that you should just make every paycheck without thinking about it.
Almost all retirement accounts offer a method to automate bank transfers. You can usually schedule this time to be exactly on those days or shortly after you receive your paycheck.
Set them up so you never have to think about it, and make sure you invest enough for a comfortable retirement.
While you are doing this, consider setting up automatic transfers to your savings account. Most banks also offer the ability to set up automatic, scheduled bank transfers at any time slot.
If you do this around the time you get paid, you can create a strong emergency fund to help you overcome any difficulties. An emergency fund can also help you avoid debt.
It doesn’t take long to set up an emergency savings fund if you set up an automatic transfer so you don’t have to think about it.
Automate the boring things and simplify your life
You will notice that none of the above solutions require programming or complex scripting. All you need to look for is the services you already use and the automated options that are there.
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