I'd like to give you advice, but the more I speak to moms and dads my age, the more I realize there is no 100% fail-safe rule for making childcare easier, so none of this is a guarantee.
Just don't buy the video monitors, you'll never spend much time looking at them, unless you want even less sleep than before. Every father I've met said they're a waste, so I didn't bother. The vacuum cleaner is great for putting loud babies to sleep, despite the noise. I'm not sure why...maybe the industrial music I listed to years ago managed to get in her genes. My daughter also liked to be swaddled when sleeping, until she turned 6 months old. There's a swaddling blanket with small Velcro straps that made sleep, and thus, life a lot easier for all of us.
An automated swinging chair helped a ton too. She loved it, and so now car rides are a breeze. We also use one of those "natural"-noise-making machines; she likes the constant artificial sounds of waves gently coming to shore. She can't stand silence when trying to sleep. Looking at all this technology now, it makes me wonder how-in-the-heck infants were raised 25 years ago.
One advantage to being young and having a kid, is that you can go to work/play with a mere 3 hours of sleep and it won't faze you. It wasn't so easy for me, at 32, with my best partying and all-nighter years well behind me. More like boot camp.
talk about ironic, what's even more ironic is that we were each others first 
(a medical expert)
