How to Automate Your Life (So You Can Get Back to What’s Really Important)

As time goes by, the daily drudgery of adulting can sneak up on you. Cooking. Shopping. Bills. Emails. No matter how efficiently you check off your to-do list, those nagging responsibilities somehow always find their way back to you. But today, you’ve got an ally on your side: automation. With the right tools, you can let automation take over the repetitive and the mundane so you have the time, energy, and resources to focus on what truly matters.

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10 ways to automate your life in 2024

Whether you want more time back in your morning routine, less stress at the end of the workday, or just a helping hand around the house, there’s a slew of both free and paid automation tools to help you delegate the dull and find more time for freedom and fun.

1. Leverage AI like ChatGPT

There’s a reason no one can shut up about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot from OpenAI. Since its launch in November 2022, the intelligent bot has taken the world by storm. While there may be a lot of controversy surrounding ChatGPT and what role it will play in the knowledge workforce, education, and pretty much every industry around the world, the chatbot is no doubt a boon for saving time and streamlining your daily to-do list. The technology really shines when it comes to automating information-gathering tasks. For example, you can use ChatGPT to draft emails for you, conduct basic research (like planning your travel itinerary to London), or translate foreign texts. Think of the little bot as your new sidekick for research, brainstorming, and ideation so you can simplify your routine and speed up your workflow to save time and stress.

2. Consider hiring a VA for time-consuming tasks

A virtual assistant (VA) is basically a digital personal assistant. For example, the typical VA can handle tasks like answering emails, booking meetings and appointments, managing social media pages, data entry, etc. While hiring an assistant may seem like a seriously bougie flex, there are actually a lot of ways to connect with professional VAs who are efficient AND affordable. (Hint: Head to HireVA, FreeUp, or Zirtual for help with the hiring process.) Ultimately, outsourcing time-consuming tasks like booking travel arrangements and answering routine emails is one of the easiest ways to eliminate these time-consuming tasks from your daily routine so you can put your energy into things that really matter to you.

3. Automate your finances

The days of sitting down with pen and paper and balancing your checkbook are pretty much long behind us (unless you’re my grandma). But that doesn’t mean you can totally ignore your monthly cash flow. Instead, look for ways to automate your finances so you can still practice healthy budgeting and saving without having to spend time at the computer every day. For example, set up a direct deposit to send money from your paycheck straight to your savings account. This way, you’ll grow your savings without even having to think about it. You can also set your bills to autopay so you’ll never miss a payment. Pro tip: While these automation strategies will save you from a lot of repetitive clicking throughout the month, make sure you still schedule regular financial check-ins with yourself to review your spending and your budget.

4. Schedule online shopping

Some people love cruising the aisles of Whole Foods and discovering new flavors of granola and different detergent scents. If you’d rather be doing literally anything else at the end of the workday … well, you can. Today, most stores offer online ordering and delivery so you can get your home essentials straight to your door without the hassle of driving to the store, shopping, waiting in line, and lugging it all home. Even if you don’t want to buy your groceries online, this is a great hack to automate purchases like toilet paper, garbage bags, dish soap, etc. Plus, most stores will let you sign up for a subscription so you can set it and forget it (usually, at a discount, too!).

5. Delegate trip planning

If you’re anything like us, you love to scour the Internet for a good deal on your next flight or hotel booking. But while we definitely like to save cash on our travels, all of that comparison shopping and continuous deal-checking can eat up a lot of time. Enter our trusty friends like TripAdvisor, AirfareWatchdog, and Booking.com. With these travel sites, you can set a search for your ideal flight, travel destination, or hotel booking. Rather than checking back again and again and waiting for a deal to come up, you’ll get an alert sent straight to your email or phone when there’s finally a low price for that dream flight to Barcelona so you can snag good travel deals without having to spend hours on the computer doing research.

6. Intelligently sort your emails

Who else feels like they’re constantly drowning in emails? Well, we used to before we finally figured out how to make our inbox work for us. Whether you’re a Gmail fan or an Outlook guru, you can configure intelligent email filters, rules, and labels to teach your email to sort itself so you can spend less time staring at your screen and sifting through the SPAM. For example, messages from Mom? Those get flagged as priority so you never miss a message. Emails from your favorite stores? Send those to a special shopping folder so you can find deals and coupon codes when you need them. And newsletters get labeled for reading so you can easily find them when you’ve got time to catch up on the news. Training your email to work for you will cut down on your digital clutter, ease your stress, and make sure you never miss another important message.

7. Simplify meal prep

Some people swear up and down that cooking is their #1 hobby. (We think they’re lying.) All jokes aside, if you’re not a culinary maven and you just want to cook healthy, tasty meals that don’t take hours and don’t require training from Le Cordon Bleu, it’s time to bring some automation into the kitchen. Meal prep services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron deliver pre-portioned ingredients with easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes right to your door every week. Besides helping you take the guesswork out of complicated recipes, these services also eliminate recipe research, meal planning, and grocery shopping from your regular routine, so you can still eat good-tasting, good-for-you food without spending hours in the kitchen.

8. Modernize couponing

If you grew up with a family that used coupons, then you must remember Sunday mornings spent at the kitchen table with the newspaper, a pair of scissors, and the painstaking dedication to snip and clip all the relevant coupons for that week’s shopping list. While we love to save our cash at the grocery checkout, we don’t love spending time searching for coupons, clipping coupons, and then swearing under our breath in the grocery line when we realize we forgot our coupons at home and have to pay full price anyway. There’s an app for that. With automation tools like Honey or Rakuten, you can score sweet discounts at checkout without ever clipping a coupon. For example, the Honey Google Chrome Extension automatically searches and tests available coupon codes and then applies the biggest discounts at checkout so you can save cash without even thinking about it. Done and done.

9. Set up smart home technology

We can’t all afford a live-in butler and personal chef. But with today’s automation tools, you don’t need to be a hobnobbing millionaire to enjoy a little luxury at home. Smart home technology, for example, is one way to get some extra help around the house—no butler required. Use smart home tech to automate your home security system, turn on and off your lights at set times, and adjust your thermostat independently as needed. These automation tools are particularly great when you’re traveling, so you can check in on things at home for a little peace of mind, even if you’re sunning yourself in Maui or exploring the Everglades.

10. Reserve focus time

In a world of digital delights and instant gratification, it can be hard to just put your head down and do some honest-to-goodness deep focus for a few hours—especially when you’re working with a big team. But the right automation tips and tricks can help you build focus and productivity right into your work day. Clockwise, for example, has a nifty feature called Focus Time, which automatically blocks time on your calendar for deep work. Connected with programs like Slack or Asana, it’ll let coworkers know you’re busy during this time, minimizing notifications and distractions so you can get your head down, get work done, and get away from your desk faster than before.

Wrapping up

We love life and are on a mission to live it to the fullest. But no matter how free-wheeling and free-spirited you are, there’s no getting away from the fact that groceries must be bought, dinner must be made, and bills must be paid. 

If adult responsibilities are really sucking the fun out of adulthood for you, then it’s time to automate it. With the right automation tools and hacks, you can streamline, simplify, and automate the mundane, so you can still check off your to-do list like a boss—without having to do all the heavy lifting by yourself.