I try to wire my brain to do routine tasks without having to give many thoughts. Besides the usuals where electronics, gadgets, and computers are involved, I'm more interested in the ones that I cannot use machines but my own body and brain. My wife believes that I know almost everything where they are and will likely be -- I just define a pattern based system of keeping things -- think massive CSS with Classes/IDs all over and how I could quickly navigate without much effort (before Google Chrome Dev Tools and all the niceties we have these days).
Here is an example. Every morning, I have a routine where I prepare my daughter for school. I don't even have to prepare the night before.
I wake up at 6:00 AM by a soft alarm. I'm kinda beginning to wake up on my own more often these days. I go to my daughter and try to wake her up but I also know she would reply, "Give me few more minutes, please." "Ok, 5 minutes." I then line-up her school uniform by the edge of the bed -- shirt and skirt at the bottom, then the underwears on top.
I flip the light switches on from the hallway all the way down to the kitchen liting them up to make it full daylight when she wakes up. I quickly check her school bag, fill-up the water bottle, and line-up all the tiffin materials at the kitchen counter. Then pour out the milk/juice with egg/bread for her and keep it ready. When all that is done, I put the socks that I picked up while preparing her uniform, in her shoes and is kept ready by the door.
I start the tea going. To the Bathroom, brush my teeth, wash-up, dried up. Then, I go wake up my wife, "Tiffin ready to be prepared." I go to my daughter, "Times up, very late." I lift her up and show her to the bathroom door. She would have slept for about 15min instead of the 5 but that is what I intended.
Wife goes to the kitchen and cooks, prepares the tiffin, packed it and keep it in the kitchen counter. She then prepares the milk formula for our younger daughter, give it to her (she holds it in her sleep and drinks). Wife goes back to bed. I go in and finish the tea which the wife had adjusted for it not to spill over.
Daughter comes out of the bathroom, get dressed, comes out of the room and drinks/eats her breakfast. During this time, I'm in my study room, logged into the computers, get the emails flowing in for me to look later. I finish my first tea of the day.
Escort daughter to her school bus.
This is one routine that has worked really well for the family with little to no adjustment or breaks. That one hour from 6 to 7 AM in the morning all goes without much thought but more from my muscle memory, following patterns of where things are kept and where to keep them.
I hope I can call this automation.