I recently bought an Amazon Echo, one of those Pringle-can shaped devices that allows you to state a command and, through the magic of smart home technology, follows-up by doing whatever action you’ve programmed into it. After unwrapping the box and setting everything up, I successfully commanded my Echo to remotely turn off the lights through a single breath: “Echo, turn off Living Room bulbs.” Amazing!

I proudly called in my wife to show her the demonstration, and with a huge grin plastered on my face, repeated the command. It was pure joy.

“Well,” I asked, “what do you think? Isn’t that incredible?”

“So…you just talk and the lights go off?”

I nodded. “Coolest thing ever, right?”

She shrugged. “Why not shut off the lights yourself?”

There was a long pause as I considered this. “What’s the point of that? Then it wouldn’t be interesting.”

“Right,” she said, “but then it wouldn’t be so lazy, either.”

Okay, I get the point. Some things may not be worth the effort. But I wouldn’t necessarily call it “laziness”–more like practicality.

Without going too deep into the marital debate, I feel that a clear justification is necessary. let’s take the position that technology  has always been about making our lives simpler and more efficient. It’s easy to come up with that hypothesis: The first people who walked extensive distances eventually came to the conclusion that they could get where they wanted faster by putting wheels together to produce the horse-drawn cart.

The need for efficiency then led civilization to invent the chariot, then the horse-drawn carriage and eventually, the whole animal-pulling idea went by the wayside after the first mechanical motor. Follow that up with the factory model, and then eventually the modern assembly-line in which the final product could be rolled out in a record amount of time and minimal amount of labor.

All of this happened because people wanted to change the way they were doing things and achieve more efficiency with less complexity.

Of course, you may argue, there is a huge difference between the globally-refined operation that can build cars with more than 30,000 parts in a matter of hours versus me telling a canister to turn off my light switch, correct?

I would say they are one in the same. At least, from an adoption standpoint.

Consider this: we only have 24-hours in a day. No matter how rich or how poor we are, where we live in the world, or whatever our physical circumstances dictate, 24-hours is all we get. It’s like having money in the bank that we are constantly withdrawing until the clock hits that 23rd hour, 59th minute, 59th second and then we start all over again the next day.

Now, we  could spend hours trying to achieve a goal or an effort in a very manual way, we would probably succeed, ultimately becoming quicker after enough practice. Using our bank metaphor, we have used up a certain amount of credit in our 24-hour day.

But now imagine, however, that we could accelerate the building process by automating the mundane aspects of our life–for example, printing out a dozen letters through a mail merge, clicking the microwave instead of the oven to cook our meals, or running a dishwasher instead of hand washing. By performing these activities with a simple gesture, we save time and, therefore, get to keep some of the “credit” in our 24-hour account.

The time that we have saved by automating these features allows us to pursue something more productive than what we had before the automation, something that–if chosen correctly–could take an otherwise wasted day and turn it into something that has more impact in both our business as well as personal lives. In short, automating those routine activities extends the potential of our 24-hour time account with more time to create business and money opportunities, ensure higher quality family time, and lead to greater personal satisfaction in our decisions. If we had the chance to automate, why not take it?

All well and good. But some of you may still be asking, what’s the amount of time saved in telling a product to shut off the lights when it would be just as quick to flip a switch?

Oh, it’s there. I’m sure about that.

And it’s still the coolest thing ever.

So how about you? Are there any products out there you’ve had experience with and see it as the next great “time-saver”? How about others that only add to the couch potato within you? Let me know by adding your comments.