**Imagine a life where you spend less time managing tasks and more time pursuing your passions.**
In *Life By Design*, you'll discover how to leverage technology to automate the everyday tasks that consume your time—so you can focus on what truly matters to you. Whether you want to spend more time with family, improve your health, or get ahead at work, this book provides the tools to help you streamline your life.
**Inside, you'll learn how to:**
- Automate your daily tasks, from finances to household chores, and free up your time for the things you love
- Master time management by automating your schedule and staying on top of important tasks effortlessly
- Optimize your health and fitness routines with smart tech to track and improve your well-being
- Simplify your work life with automation tools that increase productivity and reduce stress
- Improve your financial management by setting up automatic savings, investing, and bill payments
- Enhance your travel experiences by automating bookings, reminders, and packing lists
Stop letting life’s demands overwhelm you. *Life By Design* will help you take control, create more time, and focus on what truly matters.
**Imagine a life where you spend less time managing tasks and more time pursuing your passions.**
In *Life By Design*, you'll discover how to leverage technology to automate the everyday tasks that consume your time—so you can focus on what truly matters to you. Whether you want to spend more time with family, improve your health, or get ahead at work, this book provides the tools to help you streamline your life.
**Inside, you'll learn how to:**
- Automate your daily tasks, from finances to household chores, and free up your time for the things you love
- Master time management by automating your schedule and staying on top of important tasks effortlessly
- Optimize your health and fitness routines with smart tech to track and improve your well-being
- Simplify your work life with automation tools that increase productivity and reduce stress
- Improve your financial management by setting up automatic savings, investing, and bill payments
- Enhance your travel experiences by automating bookings, reminders, and packing lists
Stop letting life’s demands overwhelm you. *Life By Design* will help you take control, create more time, and focus on what truly matters.
We are not that busy; we are just distracted.
—Shawn Wells
The demands for our attention are unprecedented in human history. Technology and societal changes have increased these demands exponentially in just the last two decades. Think about how much time you spend using mobile devices, computers, TVs, and other screens. You’re certainly not alone because the average person spends seven hours a day on a screen!
As recently as the nineties, Americans spent fewer than three hours a day on a screen. Back then, almost all our screen time was spent watching our favorite shows and news on television. Now, in the average person’s seven hours, they are still watching plenty of TV but also using social media, streaming videos, and playing games. And while it’s true that watching traditional TV has declined slightly, social media, streaming, and video games are more than making up for it. As a result, screen time is increasing.
Today, you are part of the attention economy. Everything on all these screens is designed to compete for your attention. Social media gives you alerts for new posts, likes, and followers. Its algorithms are designed to push content that will keep you on that platform. This isn’t necessarily the content you want to see. It is the content you’ll watch and respond to, which in many cases is content that provokes a negative reaction.
Social media isn’t alone in competing for your attention. Financial apps send alerts for transactions and payments. Stores send emails and notifications for the latest sales and promo codes. Schools send parents an abundance of text messages and emails telling what your child needs to study and bring to school and alerting you to upcoming activities or their being tardy. These are just a few examples of how many things are competing for your attention.
Many studies have documented what’s happened to our attention span over the years. Dr. Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, has conducted numerous studies. In her research, she and her team tracked how often people shift their focus to something new when using electronic devices over several years. In the early 2000s, it was once every two and a half minutes. Now, it’s every 47 seconds. In the next few years, this will probably drop to under 30 seconds.
One explanation is that all of the notifications and constant competition for your attention teach your brain to switch contexts and crave something different more often. This training affects you even when you aren’t getting the constant stimuli of being asked for your attention. You’ll want to switch what you are focusing on quicker, just because your brain is accustomed to doing so.
All these demands on our attention are indicative of how many things we are expected to keep track of as modern humans. In addition, all that context-switching forces us to spend more time to get things done. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), doing more than one task at a time, or multitasking, takes a significant toll on our productivity. Numerous studies have concluded that time is lost every time we switch our attention, and over the long haul that time really adds up.
The combination of having more to do, with more competition for our attention and with devices that train our brain to be less efficient at completing tasks, contributes significantly to the reason we are so busy.
Status Symbol
While technology is largely responsible for the attention economy’s creating busyness for us, our general culture of working to appear better to others also drives a large part of our busyness. Many of us fall victim to the “rise and grind” culture. We are expected to work hard, make sure we are always hustling to make that extra buck, reach that extra goal, and achieve more to have a better life in the future.
#Riseandgrind is so much more than a popular social media hashtag. It is a status symbol that creates a type of peer pressure. If you are in the “rise and grind” culture, everyone is talking about how hard they are working to achieve more. The gig economy, where people can find on-demand work, has exacerbated the busyness caused by this culture. Sure, you can have your regular nine-to-five job, but rise and grind asks, “What are you doing on the side?” You are expected to be an Uber driver or make Doordash deliveries or consistently put out content on your blog, YouTube, and other media channels.
But rise and grind is about more than making money on the side. It’s also about doing more to be a better parent, a better friend, and a better and more productive employee. It is all about doing more to improve your future life. It’s a badge of honor that many wear to show they are hustling to get more done all the time.
On the face of it, it is admirable. But sometimes, the pursuit of status leads people to do more and more, and they get busier and busier. They often take it too far, ending up too busy and sacrificing too much of today for an uncertain tomorrow. Unfortunately, too much rise and grind will eventually grind you down.
FOMO—Fear of Missing Out
Your friends are taking a wonderful vacation in Hawaii. Your next-door neighbors are talking about the educational after-school programs they have enrolled their children in. At the same time, you get a notification on your phone about some of your favorite social media stars going live? What do you do?
You might try to make sure your kids are also enrolled in good afterschool educational programs, maybe even the same programs your neighbors have been mentioning. You might decide it is time to book an exotic vacation. And naturally, you check your notifications constantly so you can join the live stream early.
What causes you to do all this? It’s fear of missing out, or FOMO. You don’t want to miss out on opportunities that others are taking advantage of. FOMO is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. We have a horrible feeling that we are missing out because of the special pressures we feel to be a part of something. It is a form of peer pressure.
The anxiety produced by FOMO causes us to spend time making sure we aren’t missing out. We work hard to make sure we won’t miss out on the experiences and opportunities others are talking about. Sometimes, we don’t stop to think hard enough about whether we need to be a part of these activities or whether they are the best use of our time. Unfortunately, our desire to keep up with others and not miss out on experiences causes us to add even more tasks to our daily lives.
The Paradox of the Abundance of Choices
We have so many choices to make. We also have a lot of options when making a choice. On the surface, this seems like a good thing, and it certainly can be. After all, wouldn’t you rather have three good options when buying a new car instead of just one? We have been taught to work hard to increase the choices and opportunities in our lives.
As a person who spent a lot of time around friends and acquaintances that had more choices than me, I understand the drive to create more opportunities. In fact, this lack of choices was what drove me to a lot of the successes I’ve had in my life. I knew I had to work hard to create opportunities to be successful. This type of choice creation is mostly good.
The problem comes with all the day-to-day choices we have to make. What’s for dinner? Which colleges should my child apply to? Which brand of toothpaste is best? What show should we watch on TV tonight? Which dryer should we buy to replace the one that broke in our house? What contractor should we hire to remodel our kitchen?
All these choices pile up and cost us time. We have to research which option is best, and often spend time discussing and debating the right options with our friends and family. Have you ever come home from a hard day at work and just wanted everything decided for you? You just want someone else to pick dinner or to pick the evening’s activity. This is because constantly picking from an abundance of choices is time-consuming and exhausting.
I’m not saying having choices is a bad thing. The problem is that we have too many choices for too many different things. We spend too much time evaluating choices, even when many of our choices will satisfy our needs. How much time have you spent reading reviews and running Google searches for a simple product you are going to buy on Amazon? Why did you do that? Because Amazon had so many choices, and you wanted to be sure you bought the right one.
We often think that having many choices will help us make better decisions. In reality, often we’d be better off with having just one or two good choices that fit our needs.
We Are Busy for the Sake of Being Busy
Another reason we are so busy is that we are simply accustomed to being busy. It’s a habit we’ve built up over time, especially in the United States. We tend to fill our free time with activities, often because we feel unproductive if we aren’t always doing something. It’s akin to the “rise and grind” culture I referenced earlier.
One of the problems is that we occupy our free time with “fillers.” These fillers are often activities that don’t lead to significant accomplishments. They just help us pass the time. The problem is that we need rest in order to work towards higher priority achievements. The fillers often lead to our being more stressed and having less mental capacity when we finally do have time to work on our priorities.
Why do we do this? A lot of our self-worth is tied up in being busy. Being busy means you get to tell other people that you are busy and that you are in demand. No one wants to be looked at as someone sitting around doing nothing. Also, to some degree, we have a fear of being judged for what we haven’t done. Being busy is the ultimate excuse for not getting other things done. Tim Ferris, the author of the uber-popular book The 4-Hour Workweek, summed it up best with the following quote: “Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding critically important but uncomfortable actions.”
Over the years, technology has made us much more efficient. According to the Economic Policy Institute, our work productivity rose 61.8% from 1979 to 2020. Although this statistic doesn’t cover our personal lives, it is an indicator that, overall, we can get a lot more done in less time. Unfortunately, we’ve used the time saved through productivity gains to do even more, and technology makes it easier for us to do that.
Information and activities are available 24-7. If you’re not careful, you could find yourself in a never-ending state akin to being trapped in a Las Vegas casino. There’s no need to leave the casino in order to do or access anything you want. Sometimes, you don’t know how long you’ve been there or even where the exit is.
The key to breaking out of this pattern is to realize that activity does not necessarily equal achievement. You can accomplish more if you take time to not be busy. We’ll discuss exactly how throughout this book.
“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.” — Maria Edgeworth.
“You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.” — Arnold Bennett.
Of all of life’s assets, time is the most precious. Time to live is limited, while other assets—such as money, property, goods, and relationships—aren’t. Based on your fortunes, you may own more or less of them in the future, but not time! The quotes above seek to drive the point home and urge you not to waste even a moment of your precious time.
Can you manufacture more time for yourself? Quote 2 above says “No.” But you can reclaim time spent on certain tasks/activities and reassign it to other, more valuable ones. How? By leveraging technology and automation for tasks that don’t require your presence. e.g., “out of office” auto email response in your email system when you’re away from the office. You can’t automate, however, if your presence is mandatory, such as a doctor’s initial consultation for diagnosis/treatment of a disease.
Life by Design: Automate to Master Time, Health, Money, and Unlock Personal Success by Marlon Buchanan is a short, straightforward book aimed at helping you achieve what we just discussed above: find all activities that can be done without your physical presence and automate them. Then, reassign the time freed by automating to do what you’re passionate about: photography, hiking, items on your bucket list, or whatever!
If you examine your life today, you’ll find many things you can automate. This book discusses or touches upon many: health automation (scheduling doctor’s appointments, reviews, fitness exercises, gadgets/apps, etc.), financial automation (bill payment, savings, periodic payments/receipts, etc.), home automation (turning your home “smart”, resulting in slashed energy usage/bills), and plenty more.
Behind-the-scenes, the author has broken down jargon and complex terms, rendering the book in the simplest language possible, so it’s extremely easy to follow. However, despite this highly commendable effort, you may still need help to achieve your goals, particularly if you don’t have a STEM background. Fortunately, there are several simple beginner-friendly tech books (including some by this author) to bridge that gap: books on turning your home “smart”, setting up your home (computer) network, etc. You can also find further help on HomeTechHacker.com, a website operated by the author, or consult a professional if you get stuck.
The book is well-written and has an attractive and expressive cover. Chapters are short and there’s a summary at the end of each. In the glossary at the end, you can look up terms and acronyms you didn’t already know. An outstanding feature is the book has zero language errors! As there’s hardly anything negative about it, I award it 5 stars.
Automation is for everyone regardless of background, ethnicity, or occupation. Therefore, I wholeheartedly recommend it to all American citizens, especially those aged 20-55, who I believe would be the most interested in improving quality of life by automation.