Big geek - I love this stuff:

Weekly Farm share from Home Grown Wisconsin
Monthly meat farm share
Monthly condo assessment - no lawn moving/snow shoveling!
Mint.com
Auto-bill pay for all bills
Netflix
Kindle

The automation of my life has become a combo of on-line and off-line tools and habits. Much of it focuses around syncing information between my multiple computers and on-line. I use:

1. Google Mobile Sync for keep my calendar / contacts
2. Windows LiveSync for keep specific file folders
3. Evernote for task lists and note taking
4. Remember The Milk for alert reminders

For other mundane tasks, I use paperless billing and auto-pay for many of my bills, auto-refill for my prescriptions, and some other household services (lawn care is a big one) on a schedule to keep things done.

Great post and very helpful too. Personally, I try and unautomate a little bit more every day. Those extra few minutes I spend at the grocery store thinking of what i need instead of having my list has started a few conversations that i wouldn't normally have had. Of course, it's sometimes necessary to simplify the little monotonous things we do in order to be able to do big things we want. But there are some great things about slowing down, taking time and talking to more people too. Just another way to look positively at the unautomated world. And pandora is my simplfying resource saving me time looking for more music...

Easy-the Calendar on my phone makes my life easier. At 0700 it gives me an alert telling me to take the garbage to the street so the garbage men can pick it up (because we've gone months forgetting and the trash just kept building up!). I've also got BirthDays, Anniversaries and Bills! Bills! Bills!

I schedule my day based on the alerts my phone gives me. It even reminds me to go run, and to sit down at the couch and watch my favorite TV show because sometimes I'll forget that too.

I finally had this revelation that if my cleaning products are more convenient and fun (i.e. pleasant-smelling, earth-friendly, nice packaging – that's the graphic designer in me), I’m more likely to use them. I have been keeping a cleaner home, and specifically a cleaner kitchen. I love putting together meals with my weekly Community Supported Agriculture Share (another time-saver conveniently split with a coworker) and I’m much more apt to do this when my kitchen is not a sty!

I've automated many of my bill payments. That seems to really help me keep up with all the bills. Thank goodness for free online bill payment at my bank!!

While my G1 phone is one of the best inventions of the past few years, there is one app available for it which makes allows me to get past the mundane task of remembering stuff I have to do, allowing me to forget them and get on with all that daydreaming I have planned. The program is called Astrid, and it is on the surface a pretty powerful to-do list app--but there are a few things which help it help me; and that's how I keep my life automated.

Made by a smart group with a great sense of humor, We <3 Astrid, this is actually what sets it apart. In addition to being able to set any number of reminders and deadlines, and the funtionality of synciing the to-do reminders with my Google Calendar--so they show up on my home screen and on my GMail account--Astrid pops up on my phone to tell me "Hey! Get _____ done and I'll give you a cookie."

Between integrating itself into my phone and my digital life, reminding me to do stuff, and making me smile with light-hearted motivation, Astrid is the best personal assistant you can get for absolutely free! Even if she doesn't actually deliver promised snacks.

I use slife a mac app to monitor my activity. I use an RSS feed to autopost my blog posts to facebook, and my personal favorite is text expander which I use to write cover letters in 30 seconds.

I have to say online banking and bill paying . . . it saves time, checks, postage, and remembering when to mail a bill so it's not late. I've had direct deposit for 23 years so that's not new. I also love email. It keeps me in touch with family and friends without paying postage or long distance phone bills, and I can read and write at my convenience. Life is hard, but these things help relieve some of the pressure. I wonder where I found time for these years ago when I had to actually write letters and mail them, and write checks and mail them. My newest convenience is Alice.com. It's saving me lots of time, postage and money. I wouldn't have imagined this before, but it's my favorite new thing.

Sounds like a lot of repeated stuff on all of these comments.

I think it's easier for people to forget things that become automated.

Although I automate all of my bills or am paperless with my bills, I keep a monthly record of when I paid it and how much so I can just glance at it and see if I missed something.

I also set reminders for everything at work, at home, EVERYTHING!

It's important to make sure that bill was paid, it's just as important to make sure YOUR BANK PAID IT! I check my accounts often to make sure my bank is doing its job-I'd hate for them to make a mistake and because I never check my account, I miss it, or its too late for them to correct it by the time I realize it.

So in reality, while my life runs in automation, the extra time is partly spent making sure the automation is running properly and efficiently. :) You never know when a computer is going to break down on you.

I have three life automation tools. Combined, these three tools fully automate my personal life and business life and save me oodles of time:

1) iGoogle homepage -When I wake up I visit my iGoogle homepage which has my daily tasks (prioritized and synced to my BlackBerry as well), calendar, email, stock portfolio, RSS feeds, and sticky notes containing any side notes of things I need to do for the day.

2) RememberTheMilk.com -This task and time management tool sends reminders to my Blackberry, email, and via other platforms so that I never miss anything! Task locations are mapped for me, perfect if I have a meeting but I'm not quite sure where to go. Remember The Milk is synced to Google Calendar which is synced to my iGoogle page which is synced to my BlackBerry so I am super-organized!

3) Huddle.net -Huddle automates my business life by keeping my team organized and updated on tasks that need to be completed. The whole team can see the calendar, due dates, overdue items, and communicate with each other no matter where they are in the world. This makes it easy for us to meet deadlines and keep our customers happy :)

Life automation is all about finding a system that works for you to eliminate stress and create more time for doing the things you love with the people you love.

How do I automate? Call me old-school, but I use Post-its at home and at work. Yep, lots and lots and LOTS of Post-its. I even have a color scheme.

For someone so in tune with the digital era, I think it's about time I give into automation and start paying attention to services like Alice.com, Mint.com, Google, and all those shiny iPhone apps I downloaded months ago and never used.

Note to self, write "remember to automate" on pink Post-it.

My time spent toothbrushing is automated by my fancy schmancy electronic toothbrush. 30 seconds for each "quadrant" of my mouth, two minutes total which is apparently what the dentist recommends.

Not only that, I insure that I brush my teeth by adding it to my Google Calendar ("Start - 7:02 AM, End - 7:04 AM, recurring event"). Not really sure how my teeth would get brushed without this system...

i love the shopping list builder at wegmans.com!

In addition to many of the great automating tools already mentioned:
- Automatic sprinklers. I know, they're low-tech and this suggestion may seem kind of silly, but it saves water and keeps plants growing (despite their forgetful black-thumb gardener)!
- DVR. I love how you can program it to record each episode of your favorite show (you know, cuz you're busy on the computer and forget to watch); and it automatically skips reruns! And being able to zap through annoying commercials is great!
- Automatic air-conditioning with a digital timer. Ahhh... you come home after a long, miserable commute with the temps in triple-digits and walk into a comfortable, 72-degree home! Then it automatically adjusts when you're sleeping or gone to work all day. Saves energy, too.

Oops! I got carried away and missed the instruction to leave a comment about ONE thing... Great post!

We are using google docs to track our spending. We created a simple form to record our purchases on and it gets dumped into a spreadsheet with a few formulas that tally our spending for the month. This way we don't have to keep receipts around cluttering up the place and we can still use our credit card (we get reward points and we pay it off every month). No need to keep envelopes of money laying around either. It's been such an easy way to track our spending. We may soon ad a few more fields to include other items besides household spending.

I live in Nevada where certain household foods and goods are Sales Tax Exempt. Before making my first purchase through Alice.com I noticed Sales Tax was being assesed on all items, even the Tax Exempt items. I notified Alice.com's Customer Service department and received this response:

"We currently charge tax on all items but are investigating a way to make the system smarter on specific food related tax laws by jurisdiction."

Kind regards,
Alice Support Team"

Until Alice.com can calculate Sales Tax properly and not over collect, I will not be using their service.

Whoa! I just signed up for mint.com after researching it since you mentioned it on here, and it's exactly what I've been wanting for years now!

A site that takes your various accounts into consideration and compiles the information - including major loans and assets - giving you an outlook as well as trends in your spending, well, it's abashedly a dream come true for a gal who has a good idea of what she wants but not the engineering know-how to do it herself.

I've been half-heartedly doing my own upkeep of this information, but I'm not detail-oriented enough to update it as often as needed. But mint.com does all that for you. It was a little (a lot) scary putting my personal information in the system, but after reading about it through a number of different sources, I'm sold.

Hey everyone, after going through all of the comments, there were just too many to pick 5 winners. So I threw all the names in a hat and picked out 5! The winners are

Elisa Doucette
Marie Mckinney Oates
Andre Blackman
Lucia (From Employee Evolution)
Alison (From Employee Evolution)

Congrats to the winners! If you don't receive an email with more info please send an email to ryanhealy@brazencareerist.com. Thanks to everyone for leaving comments.

-Ryan

abcBreitling replica
replica Breitling watches
Breitling watches
breitling bracelet

This is a nice site. Good fresh UI and nice informative articles. I used mvc2.Also included Return Json(jsonData, JsonRequest Behavior.Allow-get) in my code.It works fine when i published in a local machine or another server.I will be coming back soon, thanks for the great article. Health Review