What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?

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).

I hate to admit it, but it’s true to an extent: ChatGPT. I use it at work a lot more than I thought I would.

While it often makes mistakes and often misunderstands me, when I get it to work, it’s a great tool for starting a Powershell or Python script or a SQL or KQL query. I use them as a foundation and build off of them and they’ve helped me learn a lot about writing new scripts and queries of my own by following along with what I got as an input when I verify that it’s safe to run and is going to do what I wanted it to do.

It’s not the most important tool, but it’s been growing on me and I’m getting the hang of using it. I especially like that it responds to errors and tries to fix them or modify for my environment when we’ve disabled something or I’m using a different version.

I’ve also used it in my personal life to write letters and it is another good foundation to start off of. Not ever perfect, but good enough to get me going in the right direction with a few tweaks.

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

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.

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."

A digital calendar that actively reminds me of upcoming events. I put my whole life in my calendar: chores, appointments, work, social stuff, etc. I would probably forget to go to something if my phone didn't tell me it was happening soon.

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.

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 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".

Water heater.

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

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.

Smartphone with internet connection.

Rice cooker. Easily my favorite appliance.

Any and all fixtures in my bathroom

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

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

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.

Electricity.

Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.

I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.

I know people are going to come for me for this one, but definitely Notion. I know I don't own my data and what not, really would love to switch to Obsidian at some point, but I have trouble with markdown and I really prefer "What you see is what you get" editors. I have Notion databases for keeping track of physical video games I own, I write all of my notes for D&D campaigns in there, I have a reminders and to-do page. It's slow, it's not very privacy focused, but it's a dead simple and very feature packed tool to organize virtually anything.

Shoes. House. Car.