Make important things automatic

Automating important things is the only way to keep improving our contribution.

Everything we do requires our time and attention, resources we have in a limited capacity.

If things take a large slice of our time and attention, those will always be the only things we do.

The only way to move on to different and bigger challenges is by automating our prior actions and freeing up our time and attention.

A day on auto-pilot

The first weekday of the month renews a month's worth of bills to pay. I'm lucky I don't have to do anything since my wife handles the finances; it's all delegated to her.

My wife, in turn, has most of our bills on autopay, though some must be paid manually. She gets through 95% of the month's bill in a single day.

Before heading out for a run, I fill the cat feeder with the cat food that is automatically delivered to us every 45 days.

I check my calendar to see which friends I'm catching up with this week through my recurring evening meetings. This week it's 2 of them, on Tuesday and Friday.

We head out to a restaurant at lunchtime, have lunch, and bring our dinner in a box. I'm vegan, so I don't make any big decisions about what restaurant to go to or what to eat.

Later in the day, I have a Brazilian JiuJitsu class, and I head out 10 minutes early to make it on time. My wife has a personal trainer and spinning class, so she always leaves on time too.

The Roomba will vacuum the house when we're out.

Many important things were accomplished today without us having to make any decisions or do much work ourselves.

Our intuitions aren't optimized for maximum contribution

It's tempting to insist on thinking about important things we do.

One reason is that we want to ensure they get done correctly, so we do it ourselves or closely monitor it.

Other times, it's advice to live mindfully, suggesting we spend more time and attention on trivial things.

These actions aren't wrong. They can help us accomplish tasks and feel better, leading to higher contributions.

But unless we then automate our tasks, that's the most contribution we'll make because they'll always require our time and attention to be completed.

Do important things without thinking about them

Whitehead has a lovely quote about how civilization advances in proportion to things we do without thinking about:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

— ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, An Introduction to Mathematics

This principle is widely applicable in our lives.

Money: Automating finances through auto-pay billings, automatically investing our salaries and 401k.

Eating: Following a diet while on meal plans, with pre-cooked meals, or in a spa.

House cleaning: Cleaning the house when a cleaner comes in every week or with a Roomba.

The list goes on.

Like tap water and electricity, inherently complex and valuable things can be automated and done without much thought.

Status quo bias and choice architecture

To understand why automation helps us accomplish tasks, we must understand status quo bias and choice architecture, concepts from behavioral economics.

Status quo bias is the tendency to keep doing what we've always done and keep things as they are. We're all subject to it.

Choice architecture is carefully curating our available choices and defaults to improve our desired outcomes.

In the book Nudge, Nobel prize winner Richard Thaler describes how we are more likely to invest when investments are automatic.

The first step in participating in a defined contribution plan, such as a 401(k), is to enroll. Most workers should find joining the plan very attractive. [..] This match is virtually free money. [..] Nevertheless, enrollment rates in such plans are far from 100 percent. Roughly 30 percent of employees eligible to join a 401(k) plan fail to enroll.

In one plan studied in an early paper by Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea (2001), participation rates under the opt-in approach were barely 20 percent after three months of employment, gradually increasing to 65 percent after thirty-six months. But when automatic enrollment was adopted, enrollment of new employees jumped to 90 percent immediately and increased to more than 98 percent within thirty-six months. Automatic enrollment thus has two effects: participants join sooner, and more participants join eventually.

Thaler, Richard H.; Sunstein, Cass R.. Nudge (p. 111). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Thaler also describes how we eat more if we have bigger plates and packages.

The same is true of soup. In another Wansink (2006) masterpiece, people sat down to a large bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and were told to eat as much as they wanted. Unbeknownst to them, the soup bowls were designed to refill themselves (with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table). No matter how much soup subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. Many people just kept eating, not paying attention to the fact that they were really eating a great deal of soup, until the experiment was (mercifully) ended. Large plates and large packages mean more eating; they are a form of choice architecture, and they work as major nudges. (Hint: if you would like to lose weight, get smaller plates, buy little packages of what you like, and don’t keep tempting food in the refrigerator.)

Thaler, Richard H.; Sunstein, Cass R.. Nudge (pp. 43-44). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

By automating operations and decisions through choice architecture, we leverage our status quo bias and ensure important tasks get consistently done.

Build systems that solve problems

We can use our time to build systems that solve problems instead of solving them ourselves.

The 4 ways to solve problems are, in order of preference:

1. Automation
2. Outsourcing
3. Rules
4. Routines

Automation means no human intervention, such as autopay of bills and auto-investments, automatically buying periodical groceries and clothes, and recurring meetings with friends and family.

Outsourcing means help from another human, such as hiring cleaners, gardeners, assistants, and employees and eating out or ordering pre-cooked meals.

Rules mean decisions through prior obligations and prohibitions, ideally automatically enforced, such as eating on smaller plates, disconnecting from the internet at 10pm, and never drinking soda.

Routines means obligations to act periodically, ideally where someone else holds us accountable, such as exercising every day, cleaning the house on Saturday mornings, and paying the month's bill on its first business day.

Embrace the automation of important things

Our inclination may be to do the work ourselves, but the only way to scale our contribution is by building systems that do it for us.

By embracing choice architecture through automation, outsourcing, rules, and routines, we perform our responsibilities while freeing up our time.

While we may think, "I already do that," the power of automation comes from relentlessly automating further – we all have more things in our life that could be automated.

If you need inspiration, here are suggestions of areas people often tell me they'd like to automate but haven't yet:

Finance:

• Set your bills on autopay
• Create a recurring automatic transfer to your investment account

Health:

• Write down the menu for the week
• Set groceries on auto-buy on Amazon Fresh or a similar service

Digital Discipline:

• Update your router to turn off the internet from 10pm to 6am
• Update your phone's "Screen Time" to disallow social media beyond 1 hour a day

Family and Friends:

• Create a recurrent time to call your parents on your calendar
• Create a block on Saturday morning to reach out to friends

In isolation, these suggestions are minor, but they work together to ensure more and more important things in life get done, an effect that compounds the more systems we create.

That in turn will ensure your time is freed so you can focus on bigger things.