The Highest-ROI Automation Is the One-Minute Margin

My coffee pot has exactly one button that matters — the one that turns it on. No timer, no app, no smart plug. It's a dumb machine, and that's fine. But I got tired of walking over to press the button every morning.

So I stuck a SwitchBot on it. A SwitchBot is a tiny robot with one job: it pushes a button for you. It sits on top of the coffee pot, and when I tell it to, it reaches down and presses ON.

That's the whole thing. No replacement, no smart appliance, no rewiring. Just a little button-presser stuck to the top of a machine that was never designed to be automated.

The one-minute margin. It saves me about a minute every morning. One minute doesn't sound like much. It's six hours a year.

Retrofit over replace. The highest-ROI automation isn't the big project or the smart device. It's the cheap button-presser that makes a dumb appliance do what you want. Automation as a workaround for something that was never designed to be automated.

Before you chase the big automation project, find the dumb thing you do every day — the button you walk over to press. The coffee pot didn't need to be replaced. It needed a tiny robot to push its button.

The field-notes version — with the GIF of it in action — is on WanderingCTO.