Ask Lemmy

I'm pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.

My refrigerator/freezer. Lets me buy food at ideal times (sales etc) and keep it fresh until it is conveneient for me, sometimes months later in the case of the freezer.

Water infrastructure.

Be it indoor plumbing or a flushable toilet or a water treatment plant, without water infrastructure modern civilization would be impossible.

Password manager (saves time typing passwords) and adblocker (saves time wasted on ads and of course malicious content).

Air fryer. Honestly, this thing just makes cooking easier. I don't need to stand in front of the oven or grill to make something. Just bung stuff in and come back in 15 mins.

Autohotkey

Limitless custom hot keys on my computer. Each one saves me a few seconds, adding up to hours and hours saved, especially having stuff automated so I can save the headspace

Google Maps. On the day before a long weekend, my drive home can turn into a two-hour slog. I keep Google Maps open and there's nothing better than hearing that "Ping! We've found you a faster route."

My urine bottles. Standing up to go to the toilet is too hard for me.

Edit: Also my phone is great because it enables me to call my wife (or my caretaker if he is approved) to give me food or new urine bottles.

Waze. It really is exceptional at avoiding traffic. I know it's dependent on higher user volume, but, in my area it is very popular with a lot of input.

I also love the user warnings. I've dodged many things I'd rather not run over in my car. From dead skunks to a ladder in middle of the highway.

My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.

At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.

I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script".

I don’t know if it saves time or not, but all the ad-busting plug-ins and PiHole I have installed. I set up a VPN that I can connect to with my phone that sends the connection through the PiHole so I get to enjoy less ads on the mobile, too.

I really despise the “open” unfiltered internet. It’s become a cesspool of ads. Mobile sites that leave you with an inch to view the site as the top and bottom become cluttered with banners, autoplay ads, cookie demands, all with super tiny “x” that are designed to not register or deliberately mis-tap to open the ad. Desktop sites with full-screen ads, autoplay, etc.

Yeah. I don’t know about “can’t live without”, but ad-scrubbing and blocking is a huge necessity just to get things done and not have to deal with all the garbage being inserted between you and what you need to do.

My kindle changes the books I read into OpenDyslexic font, which allows me to read much faster and with less fatigue.

Water heater.

I mean, "tech wise" is incredibly generic. Electricity itself is pretty much essential and something I'd have a hard time living without.

As for more recent tech, the internet. I can "live without", but a lot of stuff I do for entertainment and self education needs it. There's also the discovery, finding out about new stuff that interests me, that'd be much harder without the internet.

Even if you removed several sites, if the 'net was something like it was back in 1994, there'd still be enough content and people around to get good amounts of information back and forth, plus file sharing.

As for time saved, just think about trying to discover, not even acquire or read, just know about, some 2 or 3 books in an "obscure" subject, something that your circle of contacts is unlikely to know anything about, that local book stores probably won't have. Same applies for games or media that said circle of contacts are unlikely to know about. Basically, you have to take the dive and explore and, depending on what you were looking for, you'd come empty handed, or have to contend with a "better than nothing" alternative.

This is stupid but I was just using it so it is on my mind: a calculator. Saves so much time and paper.

A battery voltage tester was pretty cheap and I was surprised by how often I use it.

I don't know if it saves me time but my white noise machine. I literally cannot sleep without it.

Any and all fixtures in my bathroom

Rice cooker. Easily my favorite appliance.

Smartphone with internet connection.

A google map

A gas cooker. Same prob goes for electric. I cooked on solid fuels for an extended period of time and it is a very tough gig.

Most other technologies just seem to beget more time use. Even a simple light bulb requires the installation and maintenance of an electricity system, which is non-trivial and only results in you being able to stay awake longer, finding pointless things to do when you should be asleep or having sex.