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My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long?
by saimiam 9y ago
My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated.
It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on what's important to me.
- abeinstein 9y agoHow do you automate these?
- tmnvix 9y agoHabit probably.
- saimiam 9y agoFor breakfast, I decided to stop trying different cereals and stick to oatmeal. Been a horse for about 2 years now. Same with lunch - find 5 reasonable choices in the office caf, repeat. For work clothes, I have 5 decent combos which I repeat M-F. Doesn't bother me to repeat. Helps that I'm a dev so I'm always Feynman-ing myself away from unnecessary meetings and face time with business side clients. For commute routes, I watched my phone's gps for a few weeks, tried different routes, seeded new ideas for routes and detours by brute forcing options into the backend and now I can consistently get home within 50 mins of leaving work which includes driving down a few floors of parking at 10-15 mph. I used to take anywhere between 45-90 minutes before. Plus my mpg is usually at a respectable 26-28 mpg for a midsize sedan. Hope this helps.
- raitom 9y agoI never thought about automate those things. That's a cool idea! I can use the yelp api for lunch, some rfid chips for my clothes,...
- Ant59 9y agoIt would be very interesting to know how you've gone about automating those things.
- hammock 9y agoFor the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.
- Noumenon72 9y agoIt can be more complicated than that. The next shirt in line is on the ironing board, not in the closet. I have to wear a tie today! I'm pulling a shirt from down the line. Can I also have a reminder of which pants go best with that shirt? I didn't do laundry yet so half my pants aren't available. Now I did do laundry, so half my pants have only one wear left in them and half have two. Here's a <a href="http://i.imgur.com/VNJ08Ra.png">screenshot</a> http://i.imgur.com/VNJ08Ra.png">screenshot</a> of the thing I made in Flask to keep track. Orange needs to be washed next time I wear it, red needs to be washed now.
- hammock 9y agoMaybe you're overcomplicating it? Pulling the next shirt in line is a suggestion, not a requirement. Maybe you want the second or third shirt in the queue. A small amount of common sense is required, but less than if you were looking at your entire wardrobe at once with no other information about it, and trying to make a decision.
- dragonsky 9y agoI just wear the same thing thing each day, or close enough. Being married Middle Aged male Dev nobody cares as long as I don't smell and I'm reasonably neat. I certainly don't care, nobody to impress. Having five sets of the same clothes certainly makes life easier. And when I finally do change my attire the office gets a laugh out of the fact I actually went into a clothes shop.
- taneq 9y agoAnd of course, there's the "buy a full set of interchangeable socks" approach. I did this a few years ago and it's great. Pairing socks seems trivial but saving 10-20 minutes a week, every week, for minimal investment (I needed socks anyway) is a huge win. One caveat, though - if you do this, commit to it. Don't do what I did and keep one or two pairs of non-conforming socks just because I liked them. Because now they just recirculate through my sock drawer, gumming up my otherwise perfect system. :P
- rnet85 9y agoHow?
- tjalfi 9y agoThis reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann!. When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again - I had the solution to that problem.
- etreymaster 9y agoWhat about trying new things, experimenting with life?
- evolve2k 9y agoI think the idea is to remove decision making from things you personally don't care too much for to give you more time to focus on those decisions you do care a lot about.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- taberiand 9y agoDecide that you will always try something different from last time.
- leksak 9y agoI always try to identify items I wouldn't be able to get elsewhere. For instance, if I want to order a beer I go for those that are in limited stock or from a local microbrewery. Spice of life and what not.
- tripzilch 9y agoUm yes, go for it? :)
- 9y ago
- baconhigh 9y agoplease share!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kbutler 9y agoNice change of focus - automating mental tasks, rather than just computer tasks. When you don't have to spend mental energy on it, it's automated. I think that's the real benefit of Steve Jobs's standard outfit: don't have to choose, don't have to shop, just wear clothes and get on with the interesting stuff.