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The Highest-ROI Automation Is the One-Minute Margin
Tech Jan 21, 2025 · 3 min read

The Highest-ROI Automation Is the One-Minute Margin

A SwitchBot button-presser on top of a coffee pot

The SwitchBot on the coffee pot — a tiny robot that presses the button for me.

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 by me. But I got tired of walking over to press the button every single morning.

So I stuck a SwitchBot on it. A SwitchBot is a tiny robot with exactly 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 — and that's the whole argument for the boring kind of automation.

/ 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.

The coffee pot didn't need to be replaced. It needed a tiny robot to push its button.

Until the next run out — work hard, play hard.