Ask HN: How have you used automation to simplify your life?

I use automation, but can't think of cases where it simplifies my life. Automation adds complexity, an extra burden to maintain.

Maybe something simple like using an alarm clock to wake up every morning would qualify. But even that can go wrong -- the alarm can have a dead battery, it can mess up on DST changes, ...

I’ve posted this on another thread, but i’ve built a home heating oil tank monitor. http://myoilguage.com/ I can see oil usage since I started monitoring, but I also get an email at end of every day to tell me oil level in tank without having to actually be at the oil tank. This does several things, 1 it allows me to understand how much oil I actually burn and 2 allows me to not be locked into an oil delivery provider, which usually saves up to 60 cents per gallon. Quite handy when one burns through 1700 gallons per year.

Robot vacuum cleaner. Brought revolution to our lives. Since we got it, we forgot where our regular vacuum cleaner is. Especially since dust bothers me - I set it up to clean while I'm not in (for example, every day at 10am, when we're at work), and voila! Or when you're not at home for a couple of days, you just trigger it an hour before getting home, and you get a clean apartment when you're home.

So, you get more time because you don't have to vacuum yourself and it does it while you're not in, so the whole process is seamless.

I was about to reply that I don't use automation, but realized that I actually do: (1) washing machine (2) running water; on-tap, on-demand (3) gas furnace. Beyond those things, the usefulness-complexity ratio diminishes. I don't have voice-activated anything. My plants are watered by me, by hand. I do the dishes by hand. I turn on lamps with my hand. It's not worthwhile for me to automate these kinds of simple tasks.

Automated investing. When I get my paycheck, I just auto-deposit some money into my investment accounts @ Wealthfront, Betterment. Let them handle the complexity of figuring out what to buy, what to sell. Decent returns so far.

Not sure if the realm of finances is included for this question, but this is one automation that I heavily rely on.

My current automations are food related( groceries, milk, diapers), bill payments (rent, electricity, landline) and investments (daily SIP in index funds and monthly FDs). While this is trivial I really feel it has taken a load off me as I have a habit of forgetting things.

Recent example: switched to smart bulbs, not only to save power but to make sure the light is dimmed on nightly toilet walks

Everything with voice. Not that secure but only use it for nonsense things and keep the traffic separate.

cron rem