How do you Automate, Minimize and Simplify Your Life and Your Business?

[BlackLynx]

Hello all,

I am starting this thread as future inspiration for us all.

A few years ago I had an actual 'burn-out' event. I had taken on too many projects, was trying to do too much and I crashed and burned.
Since then I am on a quest to simplify and 'minimize' my life. It started in my home life - I threw away excess 'stuff' - and tried to automate as much as possible. I am trying to get rid of every single task that is repetitive or can technically be done by someone else.

For example I was getting a lot of bills for the kids' school. I had to manually pay each and every one of them. So I changed that to be automatically deducted from my account. Another example : every day I get a lot of publicity booklets (folders etc.) literally shoved in my physical mailbox. I put a sticker there that I don't want that type of thing and since then : zero publicity.

But also in my business I am using automation. For example a new newsletter subscriber gets primed by receiving a few automated emails.
I'm dabbling with Zapier and Phantombuster for LinkedIn automation.

I'm just wondering what tricks everyone is using to automate and simplify your life and your business - as a source of inspiration.

 

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[Mikkel]

I like using Trello. Great for planning and ensuring you stay on track. There are some great automation tools built into Trello or you can use IFTTT. Zapier is a good alternative too!

When I was doing product research, I used a Stream Deck. Usually used for gamers, but has powerful macros that can be used.
Example: When putting links into my google sheets, I had to copy-paste a link and then highlight the product as green, yellow, or red. The typical process would be:
CTRL+K --> CTRL+V --> ENTER
Than
Click on box --> Click on "Fill Color" --> Click the specific color(green/yellow/red)

Very repetitive when you are talking about doing this 100s of times.

On the steam deck I created four buttons:
1st button: One-click on my steam deck would perform:
CTRL+K --> CTRL+V --> ENTER

The 2nd - 4th button: Click the specific button and it would automatically fill in the color as I used a mouse tracker to click the same spot on my computer in a sequence to perform:
Click on "Fill Color" --> Click the specific color(green/yellow/red)

My favorite is using Google Sheets for my finances. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but I have multiple google sheets that automatically recalculate important data as soon as I enter my spending or buy/sell stocks. For instance, I have linked yahoo financing to my google sheets so that I can automatically see the value of each stock. I then wrote some equations to show me how my portfolio is balanced so I can buy and sell off certain stocks without having to constantly recalculate.

I also have student loans. I put in the equations that the banks use to determine how much I owe in student loans. The great part is that I can see how fast I can pay off loans by quickly adding say $100 to my downpayment. It will show me how much money I save over the lifetime of the loan too.

This works for me because I can track all my information on one dashboard and I can customize it to my liking, unlike some pay-to-use systems that lack the functionality I am looking for. Plus it is free!

Google Sheets has so many powerful features, I could write a whole article on just that.

What are your favorite automations?

 

[Bing]

I am a software engineer, so if I want to automate it, I write the code to do it. Languages I use on a daily basis (in the order I use them) are: PHP, MySQL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

Today you don't NEED to know how to code to automate stuff, but man, it helps a LOT. Especially because if you try to hire a contractor they can screw you over if you don't know what you're talking about. For example: in a past life I did web dev contract work, and I had a client ask me to fix something for them, tell me "I know it's going to be expensive" and it was a 5-minute job. I didn't even bother to bill them (they were a good client, not worth the hassle) and it probably bought $10k of future business because they learned that I was trustworthy.

Not to get off-track, sorry. Like I said, there are plenty of automation tools out there, but they vary wildly depending upon what you want to do. Auto Hot Key is great for automating keystrokes on your local PC (aka "macros"). IFTTT is great at tying two services together (ex: when I get an email to this address put it in this MailCheat(Chimp) distro list). Zapier is like IFTTT on steroids, great at effectively doing non-programmer-API-integrations (ex: when I get a message to this location with A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H send it to this OTHER location mapped to 1:B, 2:F, 3:G, 4:A). Tasker/Join are both great Android tools for automating stuff on your phone, literally to the point that you can extend your Google Home and possibly even replace IFTTT. However, as someone who literally wrote a Zapier replacement as a part of my company,

I barely use these tools personally anymore, because (as I said) I'm operating at a lower level, but these four tools are great for "cheap automation" in my mind, and worth looking into for anyone who doesn't know code and/or have a trustworthy developer.