Anything that has to be done more than once a week should be automated in my eyes.

• Two Robot Hoovers to clean up after us
• Various Foscam cameras that using human motion detection knows who is at our home
• Philips Hue Lights dotted around the house which alongside Samsung Smartthings & IFTTT means we don’t have to turn light switches on/off as much.
• Nest Heating with CO2 & Smoke monitoring, sync’d up to our lighting, Sonos speakers, phones & also local family via phone & text.
• Ring doorbell which means we can answer the door from the bed or anywhere else in the world, this also connects via IFTTT for various other alerts etc.
• IFTTT is a godsend for automation, everything from turning certain lights on when we get home to automatically retweeting certain tweets.

For reference if you buy a Robot Hoover you will stand and watch them perform for at least 30 minutes in the first month!
Also be extremely careful of leaving Macbook chargers around, they seem to enjoy eating them!