Automation Is No Longer Optional

Modern life is complicated. We live with more stimuli and inputs flying at us than any other time, whether from family members, social media notifications, text pings, flashing TV messages, and all the expectations we put on ourselves to be and do more.

Our money life is similar – more transactions than ever, more types of digital accounts and portals, and more ways to receive and pay money than ever. The days of writing a few checks to put in the mail for that month’s bills are long gone.

And this is why leaning into today’s digital age to automate as much of your financial plan as possible is crucial.

We simply can’t afford the bandwidth to do otherwise.

Automating your bill pay ensures everything is paid in full and on time.

Automating your monthly savings ensures you stick to a monthly commitment to feed your savings.

Automating your investments ensures your retirement savings goes to plan.

But more than that, maximizing how many pieces of your financial picture helps you in other ways.

Because life happens…

You go through a difficult season, you’re called away, you’re putting out other fires.

A sudden challenge somewhere else in life doesn’t negatively affect your financial progress when you have systems automated, at a time when you couldn’t help but drop the ball.

Even more than that, you have enough on your shoulders, your mental load is heavy enough, you already have enough things to be anxious about.

Taking more money details off your plate lightens that invisible swirl of things to remember always running through your head.

And when you make another layer of money management easier, more frictionless, increasingly automated, you also free space to see the next layer.

You literally allow your attention to notice the next strategic move you want to make, opportunity to pursue, or trouble spot to work on.

Without automations, routines, and systems to dramatically reduce cognitive load and effort, none of these things get much easier.

There are parts of our humanity we shouldn’t outsource to automations – our human creativity, intuitive problem-solving, and ways of connecting with each other and the world we live upon.

But automating the artificial but necessary tasks of thriving in the modern economy? Absolutely.

What could you automate more in your money management? What could you make easier, more streamlined, or restructure to eliminate altogether?

As you build your methods, remember that simple is good.

But automatic is even better.