We all get 24 hours in a day, and yet it seems like those hours slip away like sand. When we think back through the previous day and estimate how long everything took, we’re often left flabbergasted by the fact that we spent 24 hours (especially considering how little sleep most of us are known for getting).
With all the smart home automation flying around in the news and your friend’s homes, you may have one question: does all this smart home automation actually improve our quality of life? Because if it doesn’t, then we are spending a lot of money on lights that turn off in an app. But smart home automation is all about how you use it. And there are definitely ways of organizing your smart devices to make life a bit more efficient, putting some of those valuable hours back into our pockets.
Sleep
You can use smart home products to get wildly better sleep in your life, which is one of the things that most of us could do in this attention-draining world to have a better lifestyle. Devices like Nightingale will mask common noises to help you maintain a quieter sleep environment. Plenty of apps will allow you to track your sleep through the night, using noise and heart rate cues to help you get an idea of the way that you are sleeping. Also you can grab a smart pillow for even more complicated sleep data.
Additionally, waking up can be a bit tricky for many of us. Our bodies like to determine when and how we get up. But if you outfit your room with smart blinds, smart lights, and a smart hub, you can transform your wakeup routine. You can have an alarm go off and a great song fade into the room. Then the blinds go up and the lights come on slowly. Plus, then your smart thermostat kicks on the heater so that you can get up to a lovely temperature. Transforming your space like this will allow you to wake up in a much different environment. Think about how different that all sounds from a cold, dark, quiet morning! Use smart home automation devices to get a great night’s sleep and start with a boost in the morning.
Time
Smart home automation can save you time in a number of ways:
The Exit Strategy
If you usually leave the house in a hurry, and extra 5 minutes can be a huge deal. And that’s about the amount of time that you can save by remotely locking your house and turning off the lights. Many smart home automation control centers give you the option to set your house to “away” mode which means it will automatically lock the doors, turn off the lights, and turn on the security system. Plus, if you’ve got smart appliances, you’ll never need to wonder about leaving the stove on ever again.
Cooking
Cooking is essential to maintaining a great, healthy lifestyle. Many of us even love it! And you can now start your oven or your InstaPot directly from the app. That kind of control means that meal prepping goes to the next level. Pop something into the oven in the morning and then set it to automatically start before you get home. Put things into the InstaPot and set it to cook in the same way. You’ll get a head start on all your meals.
Grocery Runs
Making a grocery list is annoying, and many of us don’t have the discipline to do it. If you’ve got a smart fridge, you can stay ahead of the shopping. There are even fridges with cameras in them so you can check a live feed of your fridge interior, right on your phone, while in the milk aisle. It’s a lot easier to notice what’s missing from your fridge than to notice what you don’t have by comparing it to the surplus of a super market.
Robot Vacuums
Ah yes, in many ways one of the forerunners of the smart home. Robot vacuums took a good bit of jokes and criticism in the beginning for their tendency to, well, not do a great job of cleaning the floor. They were also more known for their viral pet antics than their cleaning abilities.
But robot vacuums have come a long way, and now if you’re willing to pay for it, you may not have to dust of the big machine from the closet again. There are lots of great robot vacuums that you can start, directly from an app. If you want your bot to run while you’re away, simply start it directly from your app.
Bodily Health
While Fitbit and Apple Watches have been tracking health stats for a while, there are even more smart devices that can hook up to your phone and let you know how your life is going. There are now smart water bottles that can tell you how much you’ve drank over the course of the day and display the levels of hydration that you’re maintaining. They can even monitor the quality of your water! Also, they can have alerts to remind you to drink up.
Dental hygiene is critical to your long term health, and one great way to do that is to put a dentist in your hand with a smart tooth brush. With the associated app, you can track your brushing habits to do way more than just check if you’re brushing often enough. Smart toothbrushes can tell you about the movement and coverage that your mouth is getting.
Smart jump ropes and smart exercise equipment will help you maintain a good fitness level. But the more exciting smart device that you can bring into your kitchen is a smart blender. Smart blenders can monitor the things that you put into the smoothie, and the amounts of those things. They have a real time display that shows you the current calorie and nutritional information of your home creation. That’s amazing technology! You can even track your fitness over time with the blender and use specific recipes and goals.
