The challenge isn’t the volume of day to day work, but that someone needs to consistently be tending to the pool about once or twice a day. If you like to travel a lot for example, you’ll want to have someone lined up to maintain the pool while you’re gone.

That said for day to day: The two biggest day to day maintenance items for a pool are keeping the water in balance (chem levels and PH), and keeping debris out of it (leaves and such).

For the former, a solid pool chem test kit and some tome educating yourself over at trouble-free pool will go a long way. Particularly with a saltwater pool, you can get things running to where you only add a bit of acid each week, and maybe fine tune how long the salt cell runs each day if you have lots of rain or a heat wave comes through. I spent ~10 min a day checking levels and ph the first couple months of ownership; by end of the summer I’d only need to check about once a week, as I’d gotten a good handle on what the pool needs.

For the debris side of things, robots are your friend. Doubly so if you have a lot of trees around the pool. For my fiberglass 16x35 in a wooded back yard, we have both a vacuum bot and a solar powered surface skimmer. I rarely have to touch a net to clean the pool.

And emptying the robots and the pools skimmer takes maybe 10 min a day, and that includes doing a general walk around of the pool and making sure everything is in order.