HACKER Q&A
📣 yu3zhou4

How much of your life can be automated?


I guess many of you enjoy automating stuff and so do I.

As in title, how far can we go with automating things with our lives?

Starting from simple and maybe obvious things like:

- floor cleaning robots

- food preparation robots (think thermomix and similar)

- setting up reminders and notifications so you don't have to remember meetings, deadlines, birthdays and check on your scheduled things manually

What else did you build or purchase to make life easier?

  👤 humbleferret Accepted Answer ✓
Not so much 'automation', but services I've used or currently use to speed things up.

Regular Tasks:

    Cleaning Service: A 'deep clean' every 3–4 weeks.

    Mail Management: Automatic scanning and uploading of non-critical mail to Google Drive automatically.
    
    Meal Planning and shopping via Samsung Food: I just plan meals from their massive list of recipes, then just export the list of ingredients required to Amazon Fresh or another supermarket every 1–2 weeks.
Custom Scripts:

    File Organisation: Small script to organise my downloads, documents, and project repositories by file type every 24 hours.

    Note Reformatting: I use a script to reformat notes in Obsidian based on specific tags. Such as adding backlinks, more tags and a template when a markdown note contains a certain tag string.
Cool 'automations' I've seen or used at friends places:

    Automatic Blinds: Blinds that opened when the alarm went off — Bliss. 
 
    Automatic Cat Litter Machine: Don't have cats myself, but friends have sworn by them.
👤 linsomniac
Speaking of room cleaning robots, we got one ~5 years ago and I was super skeptical about it being more trouble than it's worth... It has been really robust, all the issues it's had have been easy to resolve (cleaning hair out of the moving parts mostly). However, we always have to go around and pick stuff up though because our 15/18yo kids leave junk all over that Rosie the Roomba will choke on.
👤 linsomniac
I've made attempts over the years to automate bill paying, and had some limited success. I used to have Simple and had mostly automated it before they shut down the service. I always felt like I knew how much money I had available. Since the shutdown I haven't really found anything that good. I'm using Qube now and it is leaning in the right direction but has some weirdness that I just don't understand. It's pricey though, wish it was better for the price ($100+/year).