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Ask HN: What have you automated that saved you a ton of time?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y agoTurning on the lights with my alarm clock has probably saved me about 10-20 minutes a day of laying in bed.
- rozab 7y agoI've managed to automate this even further by leaving my curtains open.
- beatgammit 7y agoI would, but my wife would hate me for it. I just have to rely on good old discipline to get out of bed in the morning.
- dangerface 7y agoYou would think it would be much more unpleasant but because its a gradient from dark to light you wake up more "naturally" feeling refreshed etc. I did it for years cant say I recommend it unless you like waking up at dawn.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y agoHow did you compensate for the daylight drift over time?
- the_seraphim 7y agolights on, lights off, im still staying in bed
- m-p-3 7y agoApplying labels on my emails by keywords, sender, etc. I know I can search them, but having them sorted in labels makes everything easier to find without actually searching. I also work hard on keeping my email inbox empty unless something has to be done on a specific email. I also try to avoid reading news at work (source of distraction), but I want to keep myself as up-to-date as possible so I made some IFTTT applets which monitors some RSS feeds combined with some keywords I'm interested in. If there is a match, I get the URL sent to my Pocket account and the article will be sent to my eReader (supported natively by Kobo), and synced to be read offline while I commute to work or go back home.
- mywacaday 7y agoI have a Autohot key script that does the following: Auto correct on some works i mis-type regularly shortcut for server names, all our sever are formatted PrefixNumber, shortkey #number types the full name Allows ctrl-v into cmd window Fills in my default fields in our ticketing system I date any note I take in onenote, #d shortcuts to todays date Signatures for emails, #tr for Thanks and Regards +- for ± #desk/#mobile for my phone numbers ctrl-alt-m to open a new email from anywhere I don't think they save a huge amount of time in general but the prevent breaking your flow to check the date, remember my phone number etc which I think is more important. Small but they add up.
- the_seraphim 7y agoI wrote a powershell script to automate the remote restart of windows services, saves me about 1 hour per day every day
- buboard 7y agoI added a gmail script to auto delete emails with a certain tag. It should be easier to do and it’s convenient because i can tag all reminders and automated emails that i would otherwise forget to delete
- eivarv 7y agoHuman context switching. I'm being cheeky; I mean closing down and bringing up all relevant applications, their state (open windows, tabs, files...) and so on for working on a given task or project. Sort of like a workspace manager for the OS. Releasing an open beta this fall. There's a short, low-res demo that kinda illustrates the basic concept on https://cleave.app https://cleave.app
- Kevin_S 7y agois anyone doing this on windows? this looks really cool and useful.
- eivarv 7y agoNot to my knowledge, no.
- 3131s 7y agoGood idea! I recently identified this as one of the huge obstacles in my workflow and now I am looking for options to save and manage my sessions in Linux / i3. So far i3-resurrect looks promising, anybody else have suggestions?
- simonblack 7y agoAutomatic backups timed for the middle of the night. Such a small thing to do, and much peace of mind.
- LiamPa 7y agoI have a few instances of bit bar monitoring services / logs / up time. https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/bitbar This has completely stopped me from stressing/anxiety over potential issues as I can just look to the top of my screen.
- seanwilson 7y agoA Chrome extension that quickly checks websites for common problems (e.g. broken links, invalid HTML): https://www.checkbot.io https://www.checkbot.io I wrote it to help with websites I was working on.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 7y agoTests. Probably a popular one for many.