[mattiask]

The key is to combine "minimalistic living" with life hacks. Reduce your life down to the essentials, then use life hacks to go even further.

For example: you probably won't get away without paying your bills so a "life hack" that automates that process will take another load of your shoulders.'

On the other hand, a "life hack" for storing "all your stuff" might not be as good as simply "get rid of all your crap"

Also good point about life design, there's not much point in "saving x minutes" or earning "x dollars" if you don't do anything useful and worthwhile with it

All in all the most important thing is to have a process, call it kaizen, constant improvement, or whatever. Try different things, measure / see what works, learn from the mistakes, rinse - repeat

[ulisesrmzroche]

The rabbit hole is in that automation, though.

[dlitz]

It's not so bad if your automation tools have a really long shelf life, and if the time that you spend learning to use them can easily be reused for other things. i.e. If you use Linux command-line tools.

I've been managing my email using mutt and basically the same set of procmail scripts since around 1999, and I'll easily get at least another 10 years out of them, as long as people continue to use email.

About 2 years ago when I got my smartphone, I installed an IMAP server (dovecot), configured it to use my existing maildir tree, and then pointed my phone at that. I'll probably get at least 10 years out of that, too.

All of this pre-dates Android, iOS, GMail, Evernote, etc., and it'll probably outlive them.

[mattiask]

I find that once you realize there's a problem that can be solved it's often the case that a solution is available if you look for it. My bank for instance makes it easy to set up automatic payment of most of my bills. Yet if I never realize that this is an annoyance that could be solved I wouldn't have gone looking for that "feature".

[Avshalom]

"Reduce your life down to the essentials" is a hell of a rabbit hole as well.