Let’s see if this little guy is up for some vacuuming…

If you have a WordPress blog, or frequent the comments section of any high-traffic site, chances are you know all about comment spam. This blog doesn’t get much traffic, but boy, spammers love it. At one point, I was getting upwards of 30 spam comments daily- comments I’d clear from my WordPress dashboard and from my email several times a day.

What a waste of time! But I embraced that chore, and stuck with it for weeks.

Why? Because it was there.

Here are things human beings are good at:

• developing good habits
• developing bad habits
• inventing chores for ourselves
• despairing we don’t have time for everything we want to do

Think about the latter two. Have you ever taken on tasks you didn’t have to? There may be chores you can reduce in frequency or eliminate outright. If you can, do so.

For the stuff that has to be done: could it be set on automatic?

My tedious spam deletion, for instance. Did I really have to delete all of those messages, several times a day? Heck no- there are plenty of WordPress plugins for filtering spam. I installed one that’s been working great so far. No more garbage comments cluttering up my inbox, and a few extra minutes added to my day!

What one chore might you be able to automate this week, thus freeing up a little more time to focus on stuff that matters to you?

For instance: do you have automatic payment set up for every utility/bill that supports it? That saves you a ton of stamps and check-writing.

Do your appliances have any timers, schedulers, or other automation features you’re not taking advantage of? Is there an affordable upgrade or technology out there that would eliminate a hated chore? I’m not quite sold on a Roomba-like device yet, but I’m keeping an eye on them because vacuuming is easily my least favorite bit of housework.

Email can be a giant pit of time-wasting, too. Good inbox filtering and automated responses can act as the secretary or bouncer you wish you had. Set up folders, and rules to route emails to those folders. Then- if you have the discipline– choose one time period per day when you’ll focus on email. For the rest of the day, close email and disable notifications.

If you have money to spare, but not time, you can hire help: a housekeeper, a babysitter, maybe even a remote executive assistant who’ll handle pretty much anything you want them to. Some people swear by Brickwork and the like! As a frugal hands-on writer type, that’s too extreme for my tastes, but it’s an interesting idea.

Identify one thing to automate away this week. If it works out, challenge yourself to come up with more time-saving tricks!

What are you so glad you don’t have to do anymore, thanks to automation? Let me know in the comments!