The Little Beginnings of an Automated Life

Writing this made me think of Kevin in The Office's "The Incentive" episode, who spoke with less words with the hope of freeing up enough time to "see world." I don't do it quite like him, but I love his notion that "many small time, make big time."

I’ve become one of those people.

Which people, you ask? Those who would rather spend an hour writing a script or automating a task than five minutes repeating the same manual task every couple of days. This isn’t something I deliberately sought out to do, but I recently discovered it has become a core part of who I am, following a recent project at work and a personal retrospective session.

When I started my role, I was delighted to find some workflows already in place to save the team hours on digital housekeeping. Still, because of my dislike for “busywork,” I took it a step further when I proposed that I take on the task of automating a deletion workflow based on certain conditions.

A few weeks later, I found myself telling someone that I can’t wait for the day when I’d get home, say, “Windows open,” and the curtains part on their own.

However, the truth is that this desire for “smartness” or “automation” didn’t start in 2025, nor did it arise from a gnawing frustration with performing low-value tasks – like setting my alarms myself!

I’d say it’s a culmination of numerous things that I can trace back to probably 2010, when I first watched Home Alone 4. I don’t remember the details of all the traps or chaos in the movie, but the scenes of Kevin’s escapades at the smart house are forever etched in my brain, with my favorite being the “Open Sesame” scene. To my teenage mind, it was pure magic, and since then, I have longed for a time when I could command technology to do my bidding.

But it’s not just nostalgia; I have also become acutely aware of the value of my time.

Something as simple as saying, “Hey Google, play me ${music} on ${music} app” versus manually launching the app(minus the distractions) might save only 30–60 seconds per task. But multiply that by eight requests a day, forty per week, and suddenly, small fragments of time become hours and eventually days reclaimed.

It’s simple and small, but it’s a microcosm of a larger realization that minor automation can significantly enhance my quality of life and give me back times that I didn’t even know I was losing and if you ask me, I think we all ought to strive for that… You know, look for those things that we unconsciously lose time to and take it back.

…and once I started seeing things this way, it’s now become hard to unsee. So whether I’m working on personal or professional projects, I’m always looking for instances of repetitive busywork that I can hand off to a script or system.

I suppose if I follow Ray Kurzweil’s predictions of a future where humans merge with intelligent machines, then perhaps these small automations today are preparing me for that very near future.