04 October 2021
Dear Laca,
On the subject of automating away stuff that sucks...
“Automating stuff that sucks” can take many forms:
- Setting up automated reminders so you don’t incite a cognative overload checking a calendar or trying to keep it all in your head
- Designing a chore to be able to be done in a bite-sized chunk (for me, this is 5-10 minutes)
- Spending money to have someone else do it, or spend money on a service that’ll automate it for you
At some point, I really recommend reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It’ll explain the concept behind allowing your brain to relax by getting all your action items into some place that you know will remind you. That way you aren’t taking up a ton of brain cycles trying to keep a bunch of different things in your head all the time.
Examples of things I automate because I hate them or hate to keep track of them:
- I have recurring reminders to call people for their birthdays or holidays (the app I use, nirvana)
- Same app, I also set reminders to start looking for presents a few weeks before some people’s birthdays
- I use postable to automatically send holiday cards or birthday cards when I’m feeling generous lol
- I hate folding clothes, so I bought launmdry baskets that hold as many clothes as I can fold in 5 minutes, and that’s the size of a load of laundry I stick to.
- Deep cleaning bathrooms, there’s no way I could split that up into 5 min chunks, so I just paid to have someone clean
- Your father hates watering the lawn, so we bought sprinklers that go off on a timer
- It’s super annoying to run up and down the stairs if you forget to turn off the lights, so we hooked up the entire house with hue bulbs
In general, the automation rule is you should look to automate anything you don’t enjoy, that is also recurring. The one-off sucky jobs probably aren’t worth putting in the effort to automate, because you’ll spend more time on the automation than the actual activity.
I may have gone off on a few tangents, but I hope this helps lol!
❤ your mother