How to Automate Your Life Today

(Funny picture of Rockin’ Robot from T-shirt. Buy shirt here.)

First things first. Get your hands on a pen and a notebook. A pencil and the back of an envelope will also work. You now have a powerful tool in gaining back your sanity.  Whether you have a plan to take over the world or need to remember to buy milk, write it down and forget about it. With your notebook housing all of your random ideas, you will have your mind clear to focus on the task at hand. David Pierce has written a great article about how to organize these lists, it is definitely worth a read.

Let’s start with the simple tips.

• Hulu with television shows and Netflix with movies - These two services are similar, one to keep track of your television show preferences and another for movies. In case you have been living underneath a rock for the last year or two, Hulu.com is a website that will stream television shows that aired the previous day or night.  It is a free service and for some has been used as a substitute for monthly cable fees. Netflix.com, again for you rock bottom dwellers, is a service that charges a monthly subscription fee for an unlimited amount of DVD rentals. The DVDs are all received through the mail and there are no late charges. The price is based on how many DVDs you rent at the same time. I use both services and would highly recommend them to anyone interested.
• Google reader for blogs and articles – Google Reader is fantastic.  It is like a custom newspaper that only includes news that is relevant to my interests. It collects articles from RSS Feeds and can deliver the news to me instantly. I am addicted to my Reader and I can’t function for more than a few days without it.
• Alice: automatic household essential items - This is a service that will deliver you essentials, such as laundry detergent or paper towels, on a regular basis and automatically. The largest advantages being that you don’t have to think about buying more paper towels and also that you won’t need to make an emergency trip to the store when you run out. This is a great idea and I plan on trying it out as soon as I have a consistent paycheck.
• Mint and automatic bill pay for automating finances - Mint is a great free tool for keeping track of how your money is spent throughout the week. It brings summaries of all of your accounts into one place for spending and saving analysis. The service is so useful that it was recently purchased by Intuit, the maker of expensive money management software called Quicken. Automatic bill pay is a great way not only to simply your life, but also to help the environment.  With automatic bill pay and paperless bank statements, much less paper is needed for these interactions.

These tools are all great, but what if you are looking for more? Mint and automatic bill pay are just the beginning. There are many more things can be done to automate your finances. Quoting Jenny Blake from her post A Day In The Life of My Paycheck:

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich offers great advice (with an accompanying video) on automating your money. I’m also a big fan of automation – my paychecks are direct deposited into three accounts, my two savings accounts are funded automatically, and major bills are paid without me having to think about them (or worry about whether I have enough money in my accounts to pay them).

There is also a great diagram that she made on her blog.  I will let you click the link to her site and stop plagiarizing her work (Sorry Jenny, you took the words right out of my mouth).  She also does a great job of highlighting Ramit Sethi’s work at the I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog. He preaches Personal Finance automation heavily and I am convinced that this is a great way to save money. His book of the same name is a must read and goes over finance automation in painstaking detail.

Some of you are thinking, “I love my automated finances, but…” Stop right there, I know what you are thinking.  You need more.  Your quest to take over the world can no longer be interrupted by mindless interruptions like email and Twitter. This is where the writing of Tim Ferriss comes in.

Disclaimer: I am not this automated. I love getting emails and Twitter @replies. But, if you feel like your concentration is too precious to waste on social interaction, there are several options available via The 4 Hour Work Week.

• Virtual assistants – hiring people to run his company for him, including providing them with answers to common questions about the product they are representing. These assistants all work for a senior virtual assistant that reports to Tim Ferriss daily.
• Email auto replies – Tim only answers his emails twice a day, and when he recieves an email, he auto-replies one that says as much. This can be a good time saving technique, but people tend to be put off by automated responses and want to recieve an email that was typed custom for their question or request.
• Dating automation – Tim’s most controversial experiment, he uses vritual assistants to maintain his online dating profiles.

These are all interesting ideas, except maybe the dating automation thing, but I feel Tim Ferriss takes them to extremes. However, if you think about it, having virtual assistants is the same as running a company with employees and email auto replies are similar to hiring a gatekeeper secretary. Tim Ferriss is controversial, but I would argue that is one of the reasons why his book and blog are so successful. Remember that these techniques were critical in his ability to become a Princeton University guest lecturer, the first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango, and a National Chinese kickboxing champion.

These are several different levels of automation, some that you can set up in minutes and others that could have an positive impact on your finances for years to come.  Have I forgotten any other examples of life automation?  Have any of you tried the methods I describe above?  I am interested to hear your point of view.

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Tagged as: alice.com, Automation, hulu, iwillteachyoutoberich.com, mint.com, netflix, simplicity, Tim Ferriss