Automate Your Most Annoying Errands with These Tools [Chores]:
Errands are never an enjoyable task and they almost always seem to take longer than they should. If you’d rather spend your time being productive or just goofing off, here’s how you can reclaim your free time by offloading your most annoying errands to specialized services.

Photo remixed with photos by Tom Marsh and mie.university.

A lot of our recurring purchases are low-priority from both a budget and time angle. You might wear socks a little past their prime or put off replacing a water filter until it’s way past the recommended date because you don’t feel like running to the store. While a number of your errands will always require your physical presence, you can eliminate a few by paying up front for subscription style services. Let’s start with those expensive and annoying household maintenance trips.

Remember Your Household Maintenance by Having Replacement Parts Shipped Automatically

One of the most annoying errands to run is the single item trip for household maintenance supplies. We’ve talked about the five recurring home maintenance tasks that are difficult to remember, but if you want an easy way to remember to do these tasks, have the replacements sent to your house automatically. Consider items like:

• Furnace/Conditioner Filters
• Water Filters
• Smoke alarm batteries

Use a service like Amazon Subscribe and Save to create a plan to mail you the replacements on schedule. The timing is going to vary by your appliances or products, but consult the manual or website of the manufacturer to give yourself a good estimation on how often they need replacement. With your schedule set and replacements automated, you won’t have to worry about that dust filled furnace filter catching fire or question why your water has bits of charcoal in it ever again.

Put the Grocery Store on Auto-Pilot and Set Up Recurring Shipments of Common Items

Ever had to stop by the grocery store just to pick up toilet paper because you forgot it on your weekly trip? It stinks and combined with the parking, shopping, and checkout time, wastes a lot of time. Automating those recurring purchases you always needs saves you from having to hit up the grocery on a random visit and helps ensure you’ll never be without the essentials.

Both Alice and the above-mentioned Amazon Subscribe and Save offer simple ways to do this. Consider setting up automatic delivery for some of the common recurring items on your grocery list like:

• Laundry Detergent
• Shampoo and Conditioner
• Shaving Razors
• Toilet Paper
• Hand Soap
• Common Spices
• Makeup

The trick is to use it for items you’ll always need and schedule it so you never completely run out. Toilet paper, for instance, is a bit risky if you don’t plan on the delivery ahead of your usual schedule.

If you want to take it to the next level, you can follow guide to setting up delivery for all your groceries. You can fully automate the process by creating weekly or bi-weekly deliveries of the non-perishable products you always get at the store. This ends up saving you a couple hours every week since you only need to pop into the store for perishables like meat or vegetables.

Get Your Clothes Shipped Automatically to Keep Your Wardrobe Fresh and Clean

It may seem a little absurd and excessive, but if you hate shopping for random, boring clothes like socks and underwear, automating those purchases not only saves you the time of making trips to the store, it also helps you avoid wearing pairs of socks that are way past their prime.

If you can’t seem to ever remember to buy yourself underwear until after they have holes in them, Meundies will get them to you on a regular basis so you can forget about it and still feel clean. For men who need a little help with socks, underwear, and shirts, ManPacks automates it all through a variety of monthly or bi-monthly options.

If you’re more of a designer t-shirt type of person, two services to consider are the t-shirt of the month clubs offered by Busted Tees or Threadless. Once-a-month you receive a new t-shirt with no selection or mental effort on your part. You won’t always get your favorite thing, but at least you won’t wander out in public with that ancient shirt for the band you don’t like anymore.

Ditch the Long Line at the Pharmacy and Automate Your Prescription Refills

Prescriptions require a lot of time and effort on your part because after the trip to the doctor you also have to go and waste time at a pharmacy. You can automate a number of prescription refills to save yourself the time of waiting in line.

If you’re getting your prescriptions directly through your health care provider, a number of them offer automatic refills and shipments. If you don’t, you can still utilize the idea with services from Walgreens, Walmart, Kmart, and most big pharmacies. This won’t include every prescription known to man, but it will automate the refills for a number of medications you may have to take on a regular basis.

You can do the same with contact lens prescriptions. If you have trouble remembering to order new packs of contacts before they run out, VisionDirect allows you to set up an automatic delivery schedule. If you prefer 1-800-Contacts, you can set up an automated reminder where they will bill you out and you can approve the purchase before it goes through.

Automate Your Dry Cleaning Pick Up and Delivery

This one varies a bit based on your location, but a number of dry cleaning services allow you to set up automated pick up and delivery. If you need shirts or suits pressed on a set schedule, you can set up a milk-box like drop-off and pick up at your own house for a small fee.

If suits and slacks aren’t your thing, I talked with a few dry cleaners in my area that can handle more sporadic appointments. For instance, I can set up a delivery and pick up for a down comforter once a year and they’ll send out an email or text message reminder for a pick up. Not all dry cleaners are able (or willing) to do this, but it’s worth calling your local shop to see if they can.

Photo by Eric.

Stop Dealing with Late Fees By Borrowing Books on Your Ereader

Returning books is always a boring errand, but if you have an ereader or tablet, it’s dead-simple to check out books and have them returned automatically with no late fees to speak of. You can do this by using a service called Overdrive, which we’ve shown you how to use before. Unlike checking out a physical book, the ebooks you check out are automatically returned after a set period of time so you don’t have to worry about the late fees.

For Everything Else: The Personal Assistant

Plenty of errands aren’t covered by the above services and tools, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have them automated. Taskrabbit allows you to find and schedule people to complete tasks in the real world. Better still, you can set a recurring appointment to fully automate the process. The errands you use this for are mostly up to your imagination. For instance, you can arrange for someone to take your dog for a walk every Monday or have flowers delivered every six weeks to someone to remind them you care. The service area is small (currently only Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Portland, Seattle, and San Antonio), but it’s a handy way to get things done if you live in the right area.

---

The only drawback of many of these services is that you’ll sometimes pay more to automate the errands. The cost to usefulness ratio is up to you, but regaining your free time might be worth the extra expense. You’ll always still have errands to run that you can’t automate or outsource, but if you can cut down on the repeating issues like the ones listed above the rest of your errands might not seem like such a pain.

Do you have any favorite tools or services that automate your most annoying errands? Share them in the comments.