I’ve always been a bit of a productivity nerd. I love finding new ways to optimize my workflow and get things done more efficiently. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with automating some of the tasks in my life in order to free up even more time for the things I love.

This weekend, my wife and I sat down and dug through our finances. We’ve been living with each other for some time now and we’ve been living with a shared budget. But this shared budget would require us to keep track of our individual purchases for dinners and groceries and it was a constant annoyance. So we decided to automate our finances by actually using our joint account and setting up automatic transfers from our individual accounts to cover our shared expenses. We’re now set up with individual and joint budgets on YNAB.

We’ve also been working on automating our household maintenance. Think of stuff like changing the air filter in the AC or making sure the plants are watered. We made a list of all the things we need to do around the house on a regular basis and set up reminders in our shared Google Calendar. Now, we’ll never have to worry about forgetting to change the air filter again!

We’re still working on perfecting our system, but so far automating some of the more mundane tasks in our lives feels like it will be a huge help. It’s nice to know that we don’t have to worry about forgetting the little things anymore so that we can focus on the bigger picture.