It's ALIVE-- I mean AUTOMATED!

It's live. After 14 months of writing, rewriting, testing every idea against my own home and my own team, and staring at my own drafts until the words stopped making sense, Live Life Automated is published and available right now.

I want to tell you what's actually in it — not the marketing version, but the real version. Because if you're going to spend time reading a book about automation, you deserve to know exactly what you're getting.

Why This Book Exists

Five years ago I was a lowly DevOps engineer. Up until recently, I was a DevOps lead at a company with about 1,000 employees. We had decent tooling, a motivated team, and a backlog that never got shorter. The reason wasn't laziness or bad engineers. The reason was that nobody had ever sat down and systematically identified which work was repeatable — and therefore automatable.

That same pattern showed up everywhere once I started looking for it — not just at work, but at home. The decisions I re-made every single day. The fifteen minutes a night spent figuring out what to make for dinner. The thermostat I adjusted by hand twice a day, every day, for years, when a $40 device could have done it without being asked.

By the time I left that DevOps role, our team had saved 250 hours a month and pushed throughput up 43% on core ticket-handling work. Those aren't made-up numbers — they came out of our own tracking and were presented in a quarterly review. But the bigger realization was that the same thinking that fixed our ticket queue could fix my mornings, my finances, and my house.

What I couldn't find, anywhere, was a book that explained how to actually do this — not for a data center, but for a life. There were books on productivity. Books on smart home gadgets. Nothing that connected the dots between why decision fatigue is real, what automation can and can't fix, and how to build a system instead of buying one more device.

So I wrote it.

What's Actually in the Book

Live Life Automated isn't a script library or an IT manual. It walks through automation as a mindset first, then gets practical:

Why automate at all — the real cost of decision fatigue, and why "I'll just remember to do it" is the most expensive plan most people run.

Automation as a mindset — reframing "laziness" as leverage, and just as importantly, what you should never bother automating.

Getting organized — the unglamorous digital and physical foundation that automation actually depends on. Skip this and every smart device you buy just adds more noise.

AI vs. machine learning vs. automation — a plain-language breakdown of what each one actually is, because most of what gets marketed as "AI" is closer to a if/then rule.

Reducing waste, setting up a home server, getting buy-in from the people you live and work with, and building an actual smart home — from a starter kit you can set up in a weekend to advanced routines that anticipate what you need.

Who It's For

I wrote this book for three people:

Anyone who feels like their day runs them, instead of the other way around, and suspects automation could help but doesn't know where to start.
The person who's already bought a smart speaker or a couple of smart plugs and wants an actual system instead of a drawer full of disconnected gadgets.
The skeptic who's heard automation pitched as magic before and wants an honest accounting of cost, privacy tradeoffs, and what can go wrong.

If you're looking for a Kubernetes or Terraform book, this isn't it — and I say that explicitly in the introduction.

What's Not in the Book

I'll be honest about what I left out.

There's nothing about enterprise IT automation — no Ansible, no Terraform, no CI/CD pipelines. Those are real tools for a real audience, but they're not this book's audience. I also don't cover industrial automation, algorithmic trading, or clinical healthcare systems. Those each deserve (and have) their own specialist literature.

What I've tried to cover instead is the automation that actually touches a normal week: your home, your routines, your inbox, and the conversations you have to have with the people around you before any of it sticks.

Where to Get It

Live Life Automated is available now. Physical copies and ebook. On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Life-Automated-Technology-Revolutionize/dp/1617048615/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F4K02T60O8MI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fU3KNaPFgWhhuVEDpdnF_NVggX3ZWPXW2MNpyRkPa1IOtlTlM536UykMxNbRyXWj.mxH_VIUS1oOLi5hT53jFF_olcgPNQJNp83k7aPyL-SI&dib_tag=se&keywords=live%2Blife%2Bautomated&qid=1782097046&sprefix=live%2Blife%2Bautomate%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1

If you read it, I want to hear what you think. Not just the good parts — the parts that were confusing, the parts where you wanted more depth, the parts where I got something wrong. That feedback is how a second edition gets better.

Let's build something.