A receipt printer cured my procrastination
(laurieherault.com)1225 points by laurieherault 5 days ago
1225 points by laurieherault 5 days ago
I was about to be a little snarky but your comment reminded me to be kind. Thanks.
I don't have a receipt printer, what helps me is an A4-sized whiteboard with marker when I feel like I'm falling behind my tasks. Also, to use todos sparingly, so they retain their effectiveness. It's actually quite underrated to forget and let go of tasks; what's important tends to stick around in your head and keep you up at night.
The snark was from my personal experience that serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money for something that hopefully solves their issues. It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast. This is why there is tons of posts about "here's how I solved my procrastination issue" when they've only used the supposed panacea for a couple of days. What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years. Then one can claim to have found a cure, albeit one that probably only works for them.
In any case, keep writing. It helps a lot if you too suffer from squirrel brain.
Thank you for your message!
You are absolutely right, and I have actually tried lots of different things and abandoned just as many methods after only a few days. But what pushed me to write this article is that this time, it was different. After several months, this method is still holding up.
> The snark was from my personal experience that serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money for something that hopefully solves their issues. It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast. This is why there is tons of posts about "here's how I solved my procrastination issue" when they've only used the supposed panacea for a couple of days.
This reflects my experience as well. Whether it's getting a special little "Getting Things Done" notebook/app or getting the accessories involved in this post, before long my brain has "helpfully" optimized them back out of my life and I'm back at square one.
> serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money... It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast
That's probably why the author has beginner tasks on the whiteboard like making a bed, washing the dishes, etc. It's hard to imagine having such tasks throughout one's entire life while struggling with procrastination.
Yes, that is exactly why this method works. Because breaking tasks down into micro-tasks really does work. And the ticket printer helps remove as much friction as possible.
That is what makes it a method that requires very little time and energy, and therefore something that can be sustained over the long term.
If you’re procrastinating, but then find a method that works and go on to use it for several years, you didn’t have a procrastination issue, you just didn’t know how to get started.
Chronic procrastinators will inevitably procrastinate no matter what method they find.
Yes, that's true, but chronic procrastinators also get older which means they know what works best for them, and also accept that some stuff might fall through the cracks, and that's perfectly fine.
Wanting to have a perfectly organised life is unrealistic. We're not machines, but we're bombarded by the message that we can do better at organising our lives, often by those that want to sell us their product.
> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.
From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.
Whiteboards have been my main strategy too. And a little while ago I ran across this: https://community.frame.work/t/whiteboard-input-module/58985 and bought the same stickers and pens and it works much better than I expected - the pens write super-durably for dry-erase and light bumping doesn't erase them at all. I have weeks-old reminders on there that are almost new looking.
For day to day stuff I just use a more normal whiteboard that I do my best to erase at the end of the day, and migrate longer term stuff to some other location. I like it better than a regimented "always empty" system since reasonable leakage from one day to the next is pretty common for me.
The good thing about todos on physical objects like a whiteboard is that the space is limited. Todo software tends to accumulate tasks until there are so many you’re overwhelmed with anxiety just opening the app, and pruning them would be yet another tasks on top of the mountain.
I love it. Using a thermal printer to print physical tasks you can crumple on completion and throw in a bin is absolute madlad goblin energy and I'm all for it. I think you've actually perfectly distilled the essence of "game-loop" and operant conditioning, and mapped it to the real world. I have been using a whiteboard for tasks, which is better than nothing, but the problem with that approach is the feedback is minor, and once erased, it's like "wtf did I even do this week". So there is limited short-term feedback and zero long-term feedback. You need both the power-up noise and the level progression for a loop to be satisfying.
I have been planning on making a system based on those long scrolls of paper for doodle boards, so at least there is a history, but of course I procrastinated on building the mount for it.
I would love to use your application, I know there's a million to-do apps out there but I get the overwhelm/daunting very easily, so I really appreciate the scope-hiding aspect.
Thank you for your comment. Seeing the tickets in the jar really helps you feel like you actually got something done.
I cannot wait for you to try my app :)
One comment: You're dopamine hacking. My belief is that eventually the process will stop rewarding you with dopamine, and you'll drop it.
Games eventually stop rewarding you with dopamine, and your brain loses interest in them. Same goes for the jar. ADHD brain needs to keep changing the process, in order to keep the reward novel. What works today won't work in six weeks.
(With me it was tearing the index card in half when I'd finished the task. Very satisfying - for a while)
Hi, thanks for the nice idea and writeup. Just a newsletter tech tip from my experience - be careful with the subscription form. There are bots looking for email fields on websites and filling them with emails from credential leaks or bad-quality emails and spam traps. You may easily end up with a mixed subscription list which will be unusable / resulting in lots of spam reports, your domain reputation might get hurt. To solve, use a captcha or an invisible "honey-pot" subscription form before the real one, use services for checking emails, etc.
Thank you so much for writing this. I have recently discovered that I have both autism and ADHD, and increasingly it feels like this mind style has a steep counterintuitive learning curve but also very high skill ceiling.
The video game analogy rings very true for me. It helps me a lot to read articles like yours because it gives me new ideas to try. I fully agree with your premise and I've been experimenting with indeed card based systems but have been frustrated by, as you noted, how having to repeatedly make the cards every day basically means I'll probably stop doing it. The receipt printer is a fantastic idea. Making mental only systems physical seems to invoke the spatial parts of the brain. I've been trying to find good ways to synchronize my mental, digital, and physical information. I'd love to read more of your ideas if you publish anything else on your mailing list. Cheers
Thank you so much for your comment, it means a lot to me!
I would avoid massively increasing your exposure to receipts. They have endocrine disrupting chemicals and it's advised to not even handle them from retail stores let alone in higher quantities in your own home.
Since the article was written, bisphenol has been banned in Europe.
If the grocery store cashiers aren't getting cancer from handling 150 receipts a day then the todo list should be fine.
They are getting cancer. That's the problem, cancer rates overall are higher and we're working through figuring out why so we can stop it. This may be one of the reasons.
I loved your article! Thank you so much for sharing. Fellow procrastinator struggler here.
What's been working for me lately is carrying a Field Notes notebook everywhere with me combined with some of the ideas you talk about here (breaking down tasks into smaller and smaller pieces). It's the perfect size for me to carry around every day.
It's also been helpful as I've been defaulting to opening up my notebook as my basic distraction device as opposed to opening up my phone.
Thank you for your comment. It is so important to be able to resist the temptation of a bad distraction.
I loved it. I think it perfectly captures the itch that causes procrastination: you had a working solution but it was not good enough for you. You've perfected it but you still have issues with it. You still managed to live with the imperfect version while working on improving it, though. I think that's the part most of us procrastinators fail.
Yes, that’s exactly it! If the system doesn’t work 100% or feels like a hassle, we just abandon it. You’ve summed it up perfectly!
It's a great and well written article. I read all of it, and as a fellow ADHD sufferer, that's rare. :)
My experiences with ADHD align pretty closely with yours. We're of a similar age, but I was only diagnosed recently, and I'm still settling into this, adjusting medication and so on. But just knowing now what's wrong with me, is a game changer. It means I can work with it or around it, instead of being in a state of frustration and despair that I can't function like everyone around me.
In my experience, if I find a task interesting and intellectually stimulating, I can grind away at it for hours and lose track of time. But if it's boring and tedious, it's nearly impossible for me to make any progress at all, unless the consequences for not completing it are severe.
Breaking down tasks is a good idea, and it's something I've thought of myself. Just vacuum the stairs. Just press New Document in LibreOffice and write ONE sentence. Just wipe down the bathroom mirror. I'm not sure I'm ready for a solution as elaborate as yours, though I find the technical aspect of it fascinating, and I might explore it just for that reason.
Thanks for your comment!
I totally relate to the way you described it! You can try my solution in a really simple way using post-it notes. Just do a few tests and see if it works for you!
I just picked up a used thermal printer to try it out myself and I'm looking forward to the release of the code.
I did notice that on mobile the left edge of text on your website is cut off by about half a character.
Also I liked how reading the article was its own game loop with progress bar, level up notifications and items! I hope you use that on future posts!
I will probably release the software as source-closed, but if you need help making a custom script, feel free to email me (you can find the address in the footer of my website).
What phone model do you have? I suspect the screen is on the narrow side.
Yes, I am even going to make a real little game to show that you can get absorbed by a very simple game if it uses the gameplay loop and multiple feedback mechanisms correctly.
Thank you for your comment!
Just so you know.
Offtopic but rewarding your article on Firefox on Android, there's a slight misalignment on the side. The left side gets cut off about 5-8 pixels, I'd say. It cuts off most of the first letter on every line.
It might be just my phone, of course. But I don't have any particular extensions installed or anything else.
I also think, like petemir, that it is a width issue. What model do you have?
Thank you for your comment! It is super helpful.
Ah, sorry for not answering sooner.
Admittedly it's not a hi-end phone. I use a Moto G7. Screen is 1080x2270 at 6.2 inches according to [ https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g7-9357.php#eu ]
Trying it again to verify... You're right that it's the width. I get a small-ish horizontal scroll. But the problem is that no matter if I scroll it completely to that side the left still gets cut off.
Really appreciate the graphics, in-between summary elements and the progress bar widget. A bit too much colorful font variants my taste as it leans towards distracting, but hey everybody is different. That was a swell read, thanks for sharing!
As far as "app which helps create overview, reduce overwhelm and taks small steps" - I wonder how many of those are out there? I have written about 3 of those already for various use cases and in different flavors. Using them over a longer period of time, once the chaos subsides or the novelty wears off seems to be hard for me personally.
The one thing that is often a dead giveaway is how many stimulants seem to have the opposite effect on people with ADHD.
I have ADHD, amfetamines help me relax, caffeine causes me to fall a sleep, some anti-allergy medication can cause me to stay awake for 2 days straight.
I read that in some countries doctors can prescribe mild sleeping pills for babies to help them stay calm during long flights. They always advice to test it before going on the flight, because some babies can actually become hyperactive from that medication. If that happens, there's a good chance the baby has ADHD.
It's a very interesting solution. I've been thinking more about filling my online time sheet system in advance but I suspect its too impractical to stick to times or keep readjusting with interruptions, so maybe I will try post-its.
I notice a bit of a link in behaviors between people I know who have ADHD and/or OCD. I'm not really sure what someone who "gives-in" to OCD impulses would feel as side effects, etc.. But I'm kind of curious if you see a downside to having followed loops for their reinforcing effects over days of work, etc?
Thanks for your feedback!
Yes, the system needs to have as little friction as possible, otherwise it becomes very difficult to maintain. That’s why the ticket printer is interesting.
I don’t really suffer from OCD so it’s hard to say, but it’s a very interesting question. I hope someone will be able to answer it someday.
Hello! I did a similar thing - however I use TXTs and command line scripts to keep track of things (similar to task warrior). It's a great approach to pick up the list every morning as I have breakfast, put it in my notebook as I leave for the day.
Calendar, weather, to-dos, all in a single thing I can keep in my wallet if needed. I recall somebody posted a project for printing daily news on the roll too (I don't)
I think the authors solution is clever since this is like getting orders in a kitchen.
You dont have to do this yourself. A partner or friend could remind you about stuff and literally send you an order.
I’d personally use one of those spikes instead of scrunching up in a ball.
Thank you for sharing!
I am curious for two things:
- How you stay motivated to create this task list each time. Or for another question - is it a new cool recipe, or have you been sticking to it for more that 3 months?
- What to do so not to go into the rabbit hole of creating and splitting tasks? For me, it is easy to overdo this step, both in breadth (too many things to accomplish) and in detail (too many steps; if you think about it, making and easting a sandwich is a dozen steps or so).
Congratulations on your first article - it's a really good one. I found the jar filling method especially inspiring. Thanks a lot and good luck with the launch!
Your writing is good - I especially liked the intro about the "game loop" and the flow state.
I'm glad you found a method that works for you, and as a fellow small-time blog author I can say I quite enjoyed reading your post.
Sadly, I've tried the task breakdown stuff before and it hasn't helped. It's not even just the fact that I procrastinate doing it, but that even when I manage to do it, it makes no difference.
Anything that requires more than a one off "session" of intellectual work is doomed. Even if I do manage to do some good work for a period of time, I'll undo it later, I cannot stop myself from throwing everything in the bin. If I force myself not to throw it in the bin, my brain refuses to function.
ADHD medication also does nothing to help me. It makes me feel anxious for a bit, gives me a pile of side effects, and that's about it. I've tried increasing the dose and all it did was make the side effects worse (including extremely smelly sweat, for whatever reason).
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Helped a little while I was doing it, then I reverted back to normal.
I've even tried the whole accountability thing, but nope. Even if I'm on a call with someone who (like me) commits to do a task, and actually does it, while I committed to do mine, my brain will just tune out and at best I'll be able to do something on autopilot (works for loading up the dishwasher, but not much else).
On the days I manage to burn my willpower to fight it, it drains my energy like Windows 11 does battery on a portable gaming handheld.
Perhaps one day I'll find my own solution and become a multi-millionaire selling a book on it.
Nothing helps me procrastinate like trying out a new trick, a new tool, a new list-making method, etc. I've killed time on dozens of different solutions, and some of them were pretty good at getting me to focus and work hard on implementing that new method, but none translated much into getting more actual work done earlier.
Nothing really helped with that until one day I realized I was getting too old to keep being broke because I wouldn't finish work until I absolutely had to, so I got a job where other people give me stuff to do and expect it within a reasonable time frame. I still procrastinate more than I should, but there's too much to do for me to do nothing, so I'm always getting through something, and maybe that will become a habit.
But I hope tools and methods like this help others. It seems like every new method is a great fit for someone out there.
I totally understand! Just for this article, I restarted it 12 times!
What really made a difference for me was starting very very very very very small, with almost no ambition. That is truly the most important point in my article, but I am not sure if I managed to communicate it clearly.
The idea is really to say something like: my goal is to write for 5 minutes, and if that is too hard, I do 2 minutes. And if I manage that, I consider the task done and I can pick another one, also 5 minutes long.
This gives me a real sense of accomplishment and helps me focus on what I have already done instead of everything that is left to do.
Yup, I'm familiar, I've tried it, but my brain is somehow unable to treat the small accomplished tasks as separate from the larger task.
It still costs me the same "percentage of willpower", if you will, as I would have spent tackling it as the first step of the larger task. And once the willpower runs out, it's out.
With video games it's not that different. What keeps me playing aren't the small rewards. If small rewards were enough to keep me going I'd play pacman all the time. The only thing that keeps me going is curiosity.
> ADHD medication also does nothing to help me.
I found that the usual ADHD medication (methylphenidate) does not work for me. However, modafinil does. YMMV.
I use one Intermec with android , I just print todo and lists for my pocket filofax - alas not possible to print under linux (proprietary drivers), and I even had to 'hack' the android intemec print-app (as it was designed for intermec android devices and if you don't use a such it put a watermark line) - TBH even their setup app is windoze only.. FFS
Cool idea!
I would note there are some known health hazards in handling thermal-paper receipts(BPA/BPS)[1] with your bare hands if you do so often. I don't know much beyond this, I would look into it.
[1] https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
Yes, safety of thermal paper is the first issue that comes to mind.
Secondly, IME thermal print can fade to nothing after 1-10 years. So these are specifically for short-ish-term use. Not for labeling something that is supposed to last a long time.
It's come up every time something related to thermal printing has been mentioned on HN lately, but this is honestly great stuff if you're in Germany: https://www.oekobon.de/
These non-poisonous blue receipts have the added benefit of being able to be marked with a fingernail, which is nifty if you're using them to print your shopping list, crossing things off is very satisfying.
Yes, very true. It's paper with bisphenol. These papers are now banned in Europe, but not in the USA.
You can also use dot matrix / impact receipt printers, they work in the same way, just with an ink reel. So no special paper needed.
They are used in kitchens where thermal paper obviously won't work. Other advantages are they can usually print two colours: black and red. And the sound is rather satisfying :-)
There are plenty of phenol free replacements. All the "problems with replacements" discussions are about other phenols.
Good point, but luckily it's pretty easy now to find BPA free paper.
Maybe someone can relate to me on this...
> With this new system, I haven't missed tracking my habits even once.
When I'm in a productive era like that it mostly feels amazing. But it also comes with this looming threat that it can't go on like that forever. The feeling that maintaining such a high standard will only lead to a big fall once something inevitably disrupts the system. It also creates a sense of burden because by being so 'active' in the world, people come to expect you to remain active. And many of the tasks you've completed lead to more tasks that wouldn't exist if you had just stayed lazy.
This, combined with the realization that I can get away with doing almost nothing productive as long as I have a job, has made it hard for me to even want to be productive.
For me, a stable job is key. The structure and accountability makes it hard to fail, and my (relative) lack of ambition ensures I don't over-commit or stress too much over work. It's everything else that I get lazy about! I have plenty of time, but it's too easy to do fun but unproductive activities.
If something doesn't trigger my "oh no, this will lead to more responsibility" alarms, I can be very productive. For example, I love to plan a trip, because it has a discrete start and end and is entirely within my control.
Are you happy?
If so, don't change anything.
Otherwise, if the lack of doing anything productive is bothering you, search for work that
1. seems meaningful to you, 2. has enjoyable aspects to it (no job will be fun all the time), 3. renumerates you sufficiently to meet your current standard of living or at least a standard of living you can accept.
THEN you will have the sufficient motivation to be productive where looking for a system that helps you be productive could be useful.
Alternatively, there's always entrepreneurship, depending on your appetite for risk and stress.
Great first article, and very interesting to see someone else using a receipt printer for bite-sized task management!
I have a variety of automations running which print actionable tasks to my receipt printer via a Raspberry Pi. It’s nice having a real-life ticket I can take hold of.
One thing to be aware of if you’re handling receipts frequently: make sure to buy phenol-free thermal paper. Phenol is toxic and some types of it are banned in certain countries.
Yes, I think having a tangible task is really important!
Since I’m in Europe, we don’t really have paper with bisphenol anymore, but that’s not the case everywhere.
Yes, you look at it carefully and if it looks like thermal paper it may be toxic.
If the substances used are known to be toxic is another matter but you won't know that even with a correct label because it takes time for us to find out that new substances are toxic.
I think this is the right approach, speaking as someone who went down the rabbit-hole of looking at alternative non-bisphenol or non-phenol image developers. The very little research on the new ones tend to conclude "we don't know if it's toxic in the long term" or in the case of urea-based papers, "it's highly toxic against aquatic life."
To the GP, if the goal is to avoid phenol papers, phenol papers tend to develop deeper black. And in the US, phenol-free papers are new enough the backside often advertises it. Some are very misleadingly labeled BPA-free, which usually means it's made with the very similar and likely equally toxic BPS.
The "tasks on slips" remind me of the Cast Deployment System that was used at Walt Disney World 20 years ago (not sure when it started or how it evolved, but it was in use then).
All cast members in every park and other location were dispatched by PCs with receipt printers. To begin a shift or return from a break, you typed in your number to a CDS PC (located basically behind any convenient backstage door). The PC would just print a slip of paper and log your out. The slip would be one of:
1. Relieve John Doe at <Position> in <Location>. John Doe: return to PC (I think it also had a multi-stage bump possibility, where you replace John and John is sent directly to bump Bob.)
1b. Relieve John Doe. John's break time Start: 9:05 End 9:35
2. Do <TASK> until 9:08 (e.g. Straighten plush in <STORE NAME> or Stock candy in <STORE NAME>)
3. You're released to go home
It was a wildly efficient system, which basically allowed their operations software, which presumably knew about attendance, ride wait times, store sales, etc. to put each person to the most useful position at any moment, and also to give people specific useful things to do during slow periods (or indeed to release them early if they didn't have anything actually important for them to do).
Reading the description of this system, I wonder if Marshall Brain knew of it when he wrote Manna, which sounds like a fancier version with an AI gloss: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
that's pretty amazing and not at all how I thought the park would run. Thanks for sharing.
Great article! Many ideas that I have also noticed put together, nicely done. Although I'm kinda curious how long you have used this system to truly "know" it's bullet-proof.
In my experience, all systems fail without outside pressure and/or right nutrition and exercise. If I eat a lot of carbs and in general, gain fat and dont exercise I get nothing done. Eating ketoish and exercising every 2/3 days and I get a lot done.
Thinking about work as loops is the right idea, I do agree. Human brains slowly accomodate new thought-patterns and one must continously keep at them to make them appear easy. Any time I come back after vacation I feel immediate exhaustion and repulsion towards programming even though it's easy to me. You just lose the familiarity.
Anyway, I write tasks down as well although my system is just a webapp I built for myself. It's interesting I built it as hacky prototype but I've never come around finishing it even though I've been using it somewhat regularly for 5 years or so. Or I write down things on paper.
The least ceremony required for the process, to me, seems is the only long-term solution. But I appreciate this another take on it.
So approximately 6 months, considering that I usually give up on any somewhat complex system after about a week.
But I agree with everything you said, especially the part about how we need to be minimalist when it comes to task management.
It's increasingly strange how psychologically different something is when it's physically in front of you vs a representation of that exact same thing on a particular sort of display, especially given apparently some representations of activities on the display are addictive, while others become repulsive. As I mentioned yesterday I'm hearing more from people that attempt to avoid screens as much as possible, and this seems like yet another manifestation of that tendency.
If our UIs were more skeumorphic would that help with all this and remove the need for the physical printer?
It's not the skeumorphism but this:
I might have 5 virtual desktops and 3 different web browsers and each of those has 4 windows open and each window has 20 tabs. Never mind the terminal windows which themselves participate.
Conventional thinking is that if you can't find things you need to download and install some new program, maybe one that splits your tabs into "subtabs" or maybe one that organizes your virtual desktops into "virtual superdesktops", etc. Trouble is now you have another thing to find with all your desktops, windows, and tabs! You just can't win that way even though people insist that you can.
Paper, however, is privileged because it lives off the desktop. It doesn't disappear when you switch tabs, it doesn't disappear when you switch windows, it doesn't disappear when you switch virtual desktops. You can tape it here or there and it stays there even through reboots.
Correct. Computers are the realm of procrastination because there are so many ways work can hide and so many forms it can morph into. If you need to work from paper, there's not much you can do other than move through it. It may get disorganized, but it is still there. There is no question that modern workers have exponentially more reason to procrastinate than workers from 50 years ago.
Do not Mac sticky notes do all that, except they don't live in the physical domain?
Isn't it just reflective of the fact that you are more disciplined about tidying up your physical world than the virtual one? (And this might be the basis for why the hack works).
I see it like when you compare digital books vs physical books: physical requires less context in your mind, and it provides direct rather than abstract stimulus to the brain.
When you go digital, your brain is writing the sticky note, but also has in its cache the instructions for the menu, the apps you normally use, that annoying notification, etc, plus your rl context. But on physical, you only have loaded the instructions for the pen and paper (and your rl context).
Having too many things in mind can reduce your executive function battery. Hope this helps! (ofc, this is an oversimplification of ADHD)
I don’t think the issue is a lack of skeuomorphism. It’s more that the devices we use can’t replicate the feeling of something tangible that exists in the same space we do. And that these devices are bottomless portals to any number of other things unrelated to the task at hand.
Picking up the phone to check my todo list puts me in contact with 100 unrelated things, and at some point becomes counterproductive.
If something like the Apple Vision Pro was more accessible and wearing it was more like wearing eye glasses, I think its ability to render objects in space would make it more likely to be an effective interface for virtual task management. Emphasis on “more like wearing eye glasses” because it needs to be an always-on type of experience to come close to replicating a physical piece of paper.
You've started a very interesting discussion. I think that unfortunately nothing replaces paper. I understand Paul's comment, I have an infinite mess on my computer but on my desk I only have my paper tasks.
That's really cool. I will just add that in my experience, with a bit of conditioning it is possible to get this satisfaction from crossing things off digital lists. The benefits are manifold:
- It saves paper
- It's easier and faster to reprioritize tasks
- It's always with you in your pocket
Personally I use Apple Notes which has checklists, as opposed to a task management system or even Reminders. The flexibility of just writing things into a freeform note and hitting a button to turn them into todos is the right balance of low friction and just enough structure. Hitting that circle to check it off when done is actually quite satisfying.
Bonus: I added a keyboard shortcut for strikethru which adds some extra satisfaction of crossing off the task (or portions of a task that i've written out).
I had a time when my condition was acting up and I was struggling to deal with JIRA and got the idea of making paper tickets with a receipt printer. I bought a few receipt printers on Ebay and learned how to use them but never really wound up coupling them to JIRA because handwritten tickets were good enough and my condition got better. Wound up printing a lot of Pokémon characters do, as reference art for Pokémon is intended for low-quality small screens and does great on thermal printers.
You can get a range of different thermal printer types, one discovery I made was that if you went looking for thermal printers in North America and looked for a width in millimeters you'd get cheap Chinese printers that were often adequate, if you looked for a width in inches you'd get name brand printers that were more expensive. Most thermal printers these days connect to USB but you can get one that connects to Ethernet which I think is ideal if you want something to be controlled by a server.
That gives me an idea. We could have some kind of random character that comes out with each task from the printer, with different rarity levels. It is an idea that might hook some people and help them stay consistent.
Yes, I have a printer with both RJ45 and USB. I spent a bit more to get that, so I can stay flexible depending on what I want to do with it.
"I got a shiny task!"
Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.
Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.
Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).
Yes, I was familiar with the concept of INCUP, but I had never seen it summarized so simply.
As for variable interval rewards, I knew about the concept, but I did not include it in the article because it is already too long, and also because I have not yet found a smart way to use it in my productivity system.
This is a topic that's really interesting to me, and I've thought a lot about it.
The approach that this guy is taking to break out of the addicting loop of gaming/scrolling/whatever is to try to take the principles that make those things appealing and port them to the things that we know we should be doing. Video games have these short feedback loops and quick rewards, so his idea is to make real life more like a video game, in some small way. I was surprised to see that even this website has little achievements in the bottom right corner, when you scroll or see a section for the first time you'll get a little popup congratulating you.
There's nothing evil or wrong about this on the surface, of course. But I wonder if it's not making the situation worse by ingraining a need for quick feedback and frequent external affirmation into wider and wider areas of our lives. In one of my favorite books of all time, Amusing ourselves to Death, Neil Postman talks about the "entertainmentification" of education. The book makes the brilliant and alarming insight that over the centuries, all of humanity's efforts have gone into dealing with the problem of lacking information (and, I would add, entertainment). But now we have the opposite problem: we are so flooded with information, and entertainment, we don't know how to handle it, and society is totally unprepared. If memory serves, Postman warns that we are becoming a people who can't do anything that isn't entertaining. And this was published in 1985, long before Tiktok and its ilk.
Another approach, which admittedly does require some mental strength, is to allow oneself to get bored. Boredom is the mother of invention. I have a theory that our brain has a preferred level of stimulation; if external stimulation is high, internal stimulation will diminish to achieve the desired total; and if external stimulation is low, internal stimulation will increase. The most productive and satisfying times I've ever had in my life have been when I cut myself off from cheap entertainment. When I do that, suddenly I enjoy the hard things again.
I have another theory, that great things are accomplished by people with nothing else to do. If we allow ourselves to swim in an environment of endless entertainment, we're effectively kneecapping our ability to do great things.
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Also, isn't handling a lot of receipt paper bad for you or something?
I have similar ideas from my own experience. I believe that humans have a “set point” for dopamine hits, if you are constantly receiving quick cheap dopamine hits your set point goes higher and you are constantly craving more. Similarly, if you back off the hits it will initially become uncomfortable but your set point will lower and you will not have those cravings.
This may be controversial, but I believe a part of the prevalence of ADHD in younger people is that their set point is unnaturally high from childhood as they never learned how to be bored.
This is my mental model as I personally have observed my set point change throughout my life. I think it makes sense logically as well as these small dopamine hits can become addictive like anything else, just to a lesser extent than something like heroin.
> Also, isn't handling a lot of receipt paper bad for you or something?
Yes if you are worried about microplastics. Dr. Rhonda Patrick has an episode where she talks about receipts specifically (at the 1hr 2m mark) [0].
To paraphrase: thermal paper receipts are loaded with BPA which gets absorbed through your skin. The chemicals are worse too since the plastics for receipts aren't scrutinized like they would be for a food storage item. They use BPA is used as a color developer in thermal printing.
It gets way worse if you've used hand sanitizer, lotion, or sunscreen recently since those increase skin permeability. Studies show dramatically higher absorption rates when your skin barrier is compromised. Although I can't find a link for that right now.
Definitely something to think about if you're a cashier or work somewhere handling receipts all day. I've started just declining receipts unless I actually need them for returns/expense reports.
I agree with everything you wrote. But for many people, giving up what entertains them is just not possible. That is why I think my method can really help those people. Thank you for this very interesting comment.
As for the paper, you need to choose one that is bisphenol-free, otherwise it is obviously problematic.
To add on top of this, it is interesting when you link it to ADHD and related conditions. Where do you draw the line between "low" executive function (core adhd symptom) and "normal"?
One may argue that if society were simpler or different than today, many of such cases would not be a problem as it is nowadays, kinda like people wearing glasses: you dont ask if they cant see or if they need help, because they have the proper tools (glasses) and environment (our own perception) that fully accomodate them when needed.
This could also apply to other things, but I am mind-wandering. Maybe somebody could draw more links to stuff like this.
This reminds me somewhat of a system by David MacIver: https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/using-a-list-to-manage-exec...
He builds his list from scratch every morning. The list is flat, so as you go about your day and subtasks occur to you, they are added to the list without explicit links to the main task.
I thought it might be risky to start with a blank list, because something important might be forgotten. But it turns out that a blank list is a great filter for what is truly important and motivating. If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
This system is also excellent for shorter periods of time. If I come home and want to get started on dinner, want to tidy up a bit and have a few other demands on my attention, I put my laptop in a central location, open up Notepad, and just start typing in everything I see around me that I need to do. Usually I start with maybe 5 items, but as I start doing things I quickly add tasks to the list, and it might grow to 15 or 20 items. But then at some point the list starts to shrink again as these small, granular tasks are completed. It is strangely satisfying to see the list initially grow and then shrink to nothing. It also leaves me with a feeling of having thoroughly attended to everything that was bothering me when I first walked in the door.
> If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
As someone with ADHD I’ve never found this to be true. I often forget to eat. I’d forget to file my taxes without reminders.
We're on the same brainwave. Literally thought to myself, "but I forget to eat all the time" and scrolled down to see this.
ADHD obviously can make stuff like this hard, and most neurotypical people seem to operate on a "if it's important I'll remember it" mentality, which I'm incredibly jealous of. I still haven't found a good system for tracking important tasks without getting "overloaded" with too many tasks and/or subtasks.
Serious question: in those scenarios, do you never have awareness about your need to eat? Or does it occur at some point, but then you decide not to eat at the moment, and after making that decision then you never revisit it?
I ask because I often realize I'm hungry or it's time to eat, but I'm too engaged in the task I'm doing and I think "I'll eat a bit later" and then once I've done that the first time I often never consider again, at least until the next meal time. I wonder if that's what people mean when they say it, or if the idea of stopping for a meal simply didn't even occur to them?
I don't usually forget to eat, but this happens to me all the time for tasks that don't have a physical feedback mechanism.
I missed a doctor's appointment today because I didn't remember to schedule a corresponding "you need to leave the house _now_" alarm to go with the calendar event, which I forgot about because I looked at my calendar once in the morning and the appointment was in the afternoon.
I will remember _some_ tasks if they "are important", but those are typically things that cause me enough anxiety that I just don't ever actually stop thinking about them until they are done. I can't really do reliable just in time recall of tasks unless it is for something I have deeply internalized into a habit.
How do you get so engage in the tasks you are doing so you forget to eat? I suppose most people here have the opposite issue, we do not engage in the task at all and once we start, we stop doing it after a short while because we find a more interesting things to do such as eating, grab a coffee or reading HN, news etc. We would love to be able to stay on the task and not go and eat.
Not the person you asked, but in my experience one or multiple of the following happen:
- I just don't notice I'm hungry (this one happens most to me)
- I notice I'm hungry but get distracted and forget
- I notice I'm hungry but I don't have the energy to devote to making/finding food
- I notice I'm hungry and I straight up don't care even though I'm aware I should
Yep, everything here, plus “Why am I dizzy? Oh, I haven’t eaten anything in 15 hours.”
> It’s been my experience that any TODO list system I use will acquire an ugh field around it that gradually turns it into a thing I’m guiltily avoiding.
Considering that all of my tasks come from my to-do list and there's no way at all I could remember the dozens of tasks on my to-do list (I'm a manager, maybe that makes it worse), it's actually just impossible for me to avoid my list. Guiltily or otherwise.
The list doesn't make me anxious, having all of these tasks undone makes me anxious. Forgetting them makes me anxious. Having everything written down then doing everything and being on top of everything keeps me calm and sane.
> If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
Varies person by person. My memory is nowhere near good enough for this to be true.
The type of job can definitely vary a lot in terms of the number of tasks and their complexity.
It would do people a whole lot of good, if they start looking at a great day as executing well tested 'checklist' rather than a 'todo list' built from scratch every day.
No wonder some of the most productive people like Knuth, or people like presidents many times have fixed schedules, clothes they wear, food they eat etc etc.
If something is working, do it more often, you want to do more of what works, at some point things that don't work wont be on your check list.
You can't generalize. Everyone has things that work for them.
Taking a few minutes to recreate that todo list for the day from a blank slate helps my brain get ready for the day and makes me more productive. (akin to stretching before exercise). I don't need a checklist for eating, cleaning, etc, but maybe some do.
I'm going to try that too. An ongoing todo list just starts to slip from my mind. I have a whiteboard in my kitchen, where I figured I'd write tasks I needed to do and erase them off when I finished them, so it'd be a continuous todo list. But after a while, it'd slip my mind and I'd go weeks without even seeing the whiteboard in my awareness, and then when I did remember it was there, it'd be half outdated and I'd have to start all over.
Getting into the daily habit of using any tool/method in the first place is the hard part for me, so making it as tangible as possible and not-too-convenient might help.
> A recipe has a great chance of success, there are few such recipes.
My partner vibe-cooks and it's almost always great.
I follow recipes I know will work because if I deviate the food will be BAD
This sort of thing seriously is dependent on the person
I did not know about this article, thank you! It definitely goes deep into task breakdown, just like what I am proposing. But I have a hard time starting from an empty list in the morning, because I can totally forget that I need to work if I do not jump straight into my tasks (ADHD brain).
>it turns out that a blank list is a great filter for what is truly important and motivating. If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.
I started using GTD, but due to sprawling list overwhelm, evolved it into nanoGTD, where I start each day with a blank page and recreate my projects and next actions from memory/imagination.
This works best on paper. To make sure nothing fell through the cracks, I just turn to the previous page.
The real value of paper year planner books is your todo list can't grow to infinate length - if you don't do something today you have to decide at the end of the day will you forget about it or manually copy it to tommorow.
it is easy to make todo items. The hard part is realzing you can't do everything and you must not do something
A while ago, I tried writing tasks on sticky notes at home and crumpling them up to toss in the trash once they were done. It felt pretty satisfying at first, but writing each note took too much time, and I eventually gave up.
Now that I’ve seen the idea of using a thermal printer to print out little task tickets, it instantly feels like a much easier system. I’m planning to get one next week and see if it actually helps me get started more easily than writing things by hand.
The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on. Often it's those exploding-in-complexity type things that you thought would taken an hour and it's constantly requiring refactoring into more tasks.
Accumulate enough of those and you start finding yourself writing more notes than you are crumpling them and can get demoralized pretty quickly every time you look at the board.
> The rule is simple: the more you procrastinate on a task, the more you should break it down into micro-tasks, even ones that take just 2 to 5 minutes in extreme cases.
This.
When I catch myself procrastinating, it often helps immensely to push myself to at least subdivide a task on my todo list further. Then try to push myself to do one of them, and if I still resist, try to subdivide tasks further.
I then move the task to a Done list by pressing a keyboard combo.
The only purpose of my Done list is exactly providing feedback the way the article recommends.
I never look back over past days "Done" entries. My Done list exists only there so that when I marka task done on my TODO list, the Done file that's open on the same virtual desktop gets the entry added to the top, under today's date, so I get the satisfaction of seeing the list grow. I used to just strike them out in my TODO list, by I found I like it better to see the TODO list actually empty out.
I could probably just wipe it every morning, but it feels satisfying knowing I have the timestamped records even though I never look at them.
Yes, the feeling of having made progress is so important. That little thing can sometimes be enough to lift our spirits on a day when we are not feeling our best.
my receipt printer is a whiteboard in the gym. I went from "I do some scattered, random assortment of lifts when I feel like it" to "I have 3 routines I cycle through every day" and what it took was writing down each routine and tracking the weight I did last time. Checking off my daily workout is my pulling a ticket down off the chore kanban. Every once in a while, as I get stronger, I get to "take a number off the board" meaning I've surpassed that amount of weight in my routine (eg: after a few weeks of doing 25 pound lateral shoulder raises I'm able to bump my routine up to 30. if no other exercises use 25 pound dumbbells I can erase the 25 off the board). That's my "dumping out the jar". It's worked for 2 years, I've gone from being at best a dilettante in this space to losing 50 pounds, gaining the ability to bench press my weight and, and this is the important part, I feel good about my body for the first time in my forty years. I think the difference is that it's several gameplay loops at once. The short loop is "do today's workout, get today's dopamine pop", the medium term loop is "let me see if I can work out more days this month than last month" and the long term loop is "let me see if I can get strong enough that 30 pounds is trivial for me". With those multiple, simultaneous loops there's a variety in the (ephemeral, immaterial, entirely made up and internal) reward that stops it from becoming meaningless. I think OP's system has a parallel structure: the two reward loops are completing a ticket and emptying the jar.
> and what it took was writing down each routine and tracking the weight I did last time.
I think there's a huge connection to physically writing it as opposed to typing and printing. I never did anything with the weight lifting logs, I thought I might, but the most I ever did with anything in the past was looking at the progression from the last few days or weeks.
I really do think that there's something reifying about the physical act of writing it down. I think that because in one of my many stutterstepping starts into the world of weightlifting I tried keeping a log on my phone and it did all the same things that keeping a log on the wall does (arguably more, the whiteboard doesn't track historical data and can't automatically generate charts for me) but it just felt like shouting numbers into the void every day. There was no sense of job-well-done satisfaction when I hit a personal best, there was no little ceremony of removing a number from the board to make room for a new, higher number. There was just a bunch of individual workouts and I either did them or I didn't and no one cared either way, including me.
Yes, that is exactly it. The tools may be different, but the essence of the method is exactly the same.
One trick I learned a while back to just sort of get my mind right first thing in the morning was to make my bed. I got it from a TV show, The Bridge, I think. It's such a small and seemingly insignificant act, but the routine is comforting and it feels good to have done something that will also bring me comfort when I go to lay down that night. It's nice coming to lay down in a nicely made bed.
I'd love to learn more of these sorts of little actions that bring calm and joy to my brain.
The "Make Your Bed" speech by US Navy Admiral William McRaven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NudLfyl2cXc
I picked it up from Tim Ferriss, "The goal is visual tidiness, not Four Seasons."
In computer systems, this could be added by default as the first subtask when you create a task: "either do the entire thing, or split it into smaller parts".
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 38, and never expected to hear that diagnosis. Main reason was my misunderstanding of what ADHD is. Like most people, I just naively associated ADHD with hyperactive kids, and thought I was just lazy and having procrastination issues.
Now that I understand it so much better, I start to recognise it everywhere. After reading first paragraph of the article, I immediately though: Laurie must have ADHD!
For ADHD the things that often help are: breaking tasks up into smaller tasks and having a way of tracking progress. You don't want to do that on a screen, your phone is a distraction device!
I write my to-do lists on a paper notebook so I can tick them off. But the label printer idea is also a smart one! Though maybe a bit over-engineered, but I guess that was just a way for Laurie to procrastinate on the solution ;-)
Genuine question: isn't this everyone? Don't we all find large tasks hard to start and so we procrastinate? Isn't it common general advice for all people to break things down into smaller steps so you can get going
Here's an analogy that might make it clearer:
Alice is in a wheelchair.
Bob has a broken leg.
Charlie is unfit, but otherwise a healthy adult.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie would all say "I find getting up the hills of San Francisco difficult". But "doesn't everyone find that hard" conflates the causes and severity of the difficulty for the three of them in a way that isn't useful for making their complaints feel heard, or addressing the complaints such that they don't have that issue.
For example:
Alice could get an electric wheelchair.
Bob could take public transit / Ubers up, or get rides from their friends.
Charlie could take up running with friends.
Right. But then when someone says "I see the symptom of broken legs everywhere now. When the blog author said they had trouble getting up the hills of San Francisco, I just knew they must have an undiagnosed broken leg", it's fair to be more than a little skeptical.
It seems silly because a broken leg is obvious and easy to diagnose. So the idea that someone has an undiagnosed broken leg is absurd.
A lot of illnesses are not as easy to spot. Even illnesses that have clear diagnostic factors might be undiagnosed if no one has done the right tests. For instance, gallbladder disease. Easy to test and diagnose, but only if someone has gone to the doctor and the doctor has done the right tests. If you've experienced gallbladder disease, you know the symptoms. So you might start noticing them in other people who just think its indigestion or a pulled muscle or whatever.
That analogy ignores what was actually confusing about this topic. A better analogy would be:
Alice has a medical problem related to hill walking so she walks up the hill wearing sneakers, Bob also had a medical problem related to hill walking so he uses a handkerchief to wipe off his sweat while walking up the hill, and Charlie, the out of shape adult, also uses sneakers and a handkerchief but not in a medical way even though his feet hurt without sneakers and he does sweat.
ADHD-I has a range of symptoms where the person needs 5 or more that are significantly disruptive to their life for at least 6 months.
So when someone reads the first paragraph and immediately thinks the author has to be ADHD because they talk about 1 of these symptoms that in isolation the majority of the world has, I ask "but aren't we all like this?"
Most symptoms of ADHD are things almost everybody experiences from time to time, some even regularly. What makes ADHD is combination of many symptoms cranked to 11.
ADHD is the difference between having difficulties starting some tasks and being absolutely unable to start a mundane task until you curl yourself into a corner and cry.
That being said, things that help people coping with ADHD can totally help people not having ADHD but suffering similar issues (case in point: planning and handling tasks)
(throwaway account for anonymity)
> ADHD is the difference between having difficulties starting some tasks and being absolutely unable to start a mundane task until you curl yourself into a corner and cry.
Can't agree with this enough.
I'm currently suffering from absolutely crippling procrastination.
I'm a successful respected principal engineer with 25+ years industry experience but in the last couple of years my procrastination has got so so much worse. I've just got through my third PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) in the last 18 months. Thankfully my employer believes in me and continues to give me a chance, but they're not a charity and they've made it clear that I need to continue to perform or I'm gone.
For example, the last PIP I knew exactly what I had to do, it was agreed in advance and completely fair. I should have had no problem completing everything without having to work silly hours. I just needed to grind my way through it and apply my experience and expertise as and when needed (when to escalate, etc). Instead I sat on things for weeks and weeks until the fear and panic of not being able to provide for my family (I'm the sole earner in the house) started to really hit and give me the necessary motivation. It was an immensely stressful position I put myself in. (To be clear, the company is awesome, they're very supportive and they really want me to succeed.)
Taking any significant time off isn't an option. It's not burnout (been there, done that). I can't afford not to be working. We're stretched very thin already due to other medical problems amongst my immediate family but we can get by if I'm working. Changing companies isn't going to solve anything either; my current employer is not the problem. I am. Anywhere else would probably be far worse.
It is utterly crippling at times; and the majority of the time. I can sit at my desk for days and do 30 minutes of "work" each day. Then the deadlines hove into view and I'm doing a days worth of work in 30 minutes.
I'm awaiting an official ADHD diagnosis and expect to be diagnosed with Inattentive type. Hopefully medication will make things easier for me.
I should have gone down the diagnosis route many years ago but, guess what, procrastination.
When I was this way there were two things going on 1. It was one of the most stressful times in my life 2. I didn't know I had sleep apnea so was always exhausted
2 was a much quicker fix than 1 and boy did it makes things much more manageable and at least get me going in a positive direction.
Also for the meds part they are literally life changing for me so hopefully they help you.
Good luck out there hope you find something that works :)
With mental illnesses there is no clear limit between normal and sick. However there is a point when it's really hurting the person afflicted.
For example procrastination: everyone procrastinate more or less, but in people with ADHD, procrastination happens even when they actively don't want to procrastinate, and even when it hurts them right now to procrastinate.
Another example : depression. It's not easy from an external point of view to see where is the limit between sadness and depression, however at one point the sadness has no objective reason, and is so overwhelming the brain that the person cannot function normally or is able to mentally fight it
> procrastination happens even when they actively don't want to procrastinate, and even when it hurts them right now to procrastinate.
That applies to just about everyone. It’s why there are countless books and articles on defeating procrastination.
I don’t think you understand depression. There’s a big difference between depression and sadness … like the difference between purple and green. They are just not comparable. This is not shades of a different color. My personal experience is: “I’m sad” and that can mean… “I want to cry” But If im depressed can be like “I’m happy.., and yet.. I don’t see the point of living.”
I think with many things in psychiatry, yes this is a common experience, but part of a diagnosis is actually about it becoming a real problem in your life. We all have aspects of a lot of different things that become disorders depending on the impact they have in your life. Not a psychologist, but this is how I understand the distinction, and why the diagnostic criteria are set up the way they are.
There is a long running conversation within the medical profession about the usefulness of marginal diagnosis. When everyone has ADHD how do doctors help the people who really NEED help with ADHD. Who 'really' needs help is of course subjective.
I think we can all agree that we are in a period of over medicalisation and we've combined that with a misconception that doctors/drugs/science can cure, and even should cure, everything.
Well people differ. Look around at your colleagues, some have dry eyes and lower back pain from working hours without interruption on a boring task.
Others, like myself, are easily distracted, quickly bored and only work hard with a specific goal in mind. Working on smaller tasks makes it easier to not be distracted. I feel this is more important for people with ADHD.
But you are right, in the end it is useful strategy for everyone :)
Every digital to-do app I've tried turns into another notification to ignore, or I end up doomscrolling instead of checking tasks off. The receipt/label printer idea is a little extra, but I get the appeal of making the process more tactile and even a bit fun. If it works, it works!
Same story for me. What has really helped is trying to make initiating useful and desirable tasks easier and seeking distractions harder. Bit by bit, cultivating that mindset changes things for the better over time.
The trap is usually "I've figured it out and this new system will solve my life" only to be burned out days or weeks later because this only addresses the symptoms and not that cause.
Cultivating a more friendly environment has been a great help for me. That and taking notes.
I rmemember what truly worked for me, as a chronic case, was a 1 day workweek. Granted I did work normal days, but I only mean things that cost motivation like side projects. On other days I even stopped myself when I started to kid myself about 'doing it'. It made me feel gross but that gross feeling helped when the scheduled day comes.
I stopped doing it for some reason. But I remember it worked. For what it is.
My mom carries with her a physical notebook in which one full page is one day. The left side of the spread is for the task list, the right side contains notes/comments. When a task is done it gets crossed over. When the day is over, she manually copies important leftovers to the next day. The other (flip) side of the notebook is for longer running projects, similar approach. Naturally, she has to replace the notebook a few times a year. She says the secret sauce is the tedium of copying the leftovers, that's how she finds the balance between over- and under-planning.
I truly appreciate how well thought out this post is. However, it's one of those things where if you didn't have motivation in the first place, it's not going to work. I've tried atomic habits. I've tried different ideas from social media of grouping rooms and things into piles to sort.
Sure, I'll get it done... eventually. But no amount of gamification will motivate me to put this much effort into habitual cleaning. I hope the author's strategy helps someone, but it assumes you have the motivation but not the methodology.
If you can, actively examine your thoughts/emotions and dissect them from a distance so to speak, when you feel stuck and have trouble to reach for motivation.
There's a power in simply accepting that it's just a feeling, whether you're tired, motivated, hungry... The feeling that you want instead, is a sort of disassociation. The stronger the feeling, the harder it will be. And then you just do the thing you need to do despite lacking motivation or being tired or whatever.
There's something liberating about it that is a bit difficult to put into words. Like "fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway". Sounds a bit stupid, but it's not entirely wrong.
However it's not a magic trick, but rather a kind of thought muscle you can try to train so to speak. It works for me increasingly, despite being quite terrible at this kind of thing. Or rather two muscles: One is creating a distance/objectivity to your feeling or state of mind, the other is to start the action. Sometimes the second part is almost automatic once you do the first part well from my experience.
Yup, and conversely, we’ve all trained the opposite “muscle” that basically says “I don’t wanna so I won’t”. Being aware of your feelings and emotions is the first step to being in control. Most people fail to adequately understand themselves and thus fail to ever overcome their lizard brain behaviors.
Actually, my method works even with very very very little motivation. The idea is that having a list of easy, routine micro-tasks ready in the morning gives you momentum. Even on a day when I have no motivation at all, I still reach a basic, acceptable level of productivity.
I even gave an example in my article about this for initial cleaning, specifically with emails. We usually wait for a day when we feel motivated to sort everything out, but that day never comes, and we end up never doing the task. The idea is to have one micro-task every day, like processing a maximum of five emails. Or even five separate tasks of one email each. And on a day when you really have no motivation, you just push yourself to handle one overdue email.
This idea really resonates. Like others have mentioned, there's a unique power to a physical artifact that a digital to-do list just can't replicate. I went down this exact rabbit hole a while back, trying to bridge the gap between my digital planning and physical, actionable "tickets." The setup part can be a bit of a pain, especially getting a printer reliably online and talking to it from different apps and services. This is the exact problem I built Printercow¹ to solve (author here!). It's a small service that lets you turn any thermal printer into a networked API endpoint with a one-line install command on a Raspberry Pi. The idea is to handle all the backend plumbing so you can focus on the fun part—triggering prints from Zapier, a script, or your own app to create a system just like the author's. Happy to answer any questions about the setup!
There's also a kind of super-cheap Bluetooth "Chinese" thermal receipt printers, also known as "kitty printer" or "cat printer". There's plenty of reverse-engineered software for printing to them in a number of languages; one I use is: https://print.unseen-site.fun/ The disadvantage is they don't cut automatically, and their "cutter teeth" are super crappy. But cheap!
I did my version of this way:
1) 3x5 cards printed on a printer dedicated to this task 2) Command line routine where I can: a) Enter tasks b) Be able to update card by putting in the card number assigned to the task (which also includes a date). c) Be able to reprint a card if needed d) Be able to view the card on the screen (obviously).
Written in bash.
This is not to be clear to do things that are procrastination but rather to be able to keep track various things that I want to get done the next day or other info that I want physically able to view on my physical desktop during the day.
(I hate to handwrite and can type very well so...)
The 3x5 card printout will contact a checkbox where you can just ink check any item.
The routine makes sure that you only type in the correct number of characters per line so it doesn't wrap.
I then modified this to be able to use larger index cards.
Index cards lay flat on the desk (as opposed to a receipt printer).
Important to have a dedicated printer for this taks otherwise to much friction changing paper.
What kind of printer prints 3x5" (or larger) index cards well?
IME most printers struggle with printing thicker cardstock, or non-normal sizes, e.g. trouble with keeping that size paper straight or with bending/feeding.
Is it just a normal-sized printer, or are there special index-card printers?
Brother HL-6200DW (or similar variation). Before that I used another brother printer. When I researched (noting this was years ago) that was the only one that it would work with (may be others now). I had tried on various HP printers but they didn't work. Now you have to be careful how many cards you stack in the manual hopper also it works but not super robust.
Having a to-do app that really pushes you to break down tasks into tiny pieces actually sounds really nice. I think that's the biggest takeaway for me here. The receipt print might seem a bit extra, but there's also something nice about having a physical motion to finish tasks while also not having to write everything out by hand. I dunno, writing doesn't actually take a long time. The post-its do feel a bit wasteful though, because they're so expensive.
I like this simple model. There's 2 variables:
- pleasure
- achievements
Both reset daily. Both can be changed by each activity.
Well-being is calulated sth like this:
def wellBeing(pleasureNow, pleasureSoFar, achievements):
return pleasureNow/(pleasureSoFar+pleasureNow) + len(achievements)
And pleasure experienced is scaled by the pleasure experienced that day so far. Which means if you do 3 things that provided 1, 10, 100 pleasure - you'll experience ~2.8 pleasure, but if you do the same things in reversed order 100, 10, 1 - you'll experience ~1.09.
So ordering the pleasures and splitting the achievements matters A LOT for your well-being.
I found this tool helpful with breaking things down to as small steps as you need: https://goblin.tools/
Yes, I know that tool, but the user experience really isn’t great. That’s why I made my own. But thanks for the suggestion :)
Yeah, I bookmarked it to read it later! jk :P
Seriously though, I'm going to try your idea with the receipt printer (I didn't need an excuse to buy it, no-no, that's not it, haha) and I'll see if it can help me. Sadly, even games cannot interest me for long enough; the longest I could play a game, recently, is a week, then I abandon it.
I like how the author mentioned typing speed tests as a “warm up” to the day. I frequently find myself going to do a typing speed test when I’m at my desk but unable to work, and have often wondered why I do that and if anyone else does that.
I am glad to see that I am not the only one doing this :)
Back at Polyvore we used real post-it notes on a board to track progress. We had a weekly cadence but the tasks were granular enough to be completed in a day or two. Each week we’d peel off and crumble the completed tasks into a bin. It was a really satisfying experience in a way that digital facsimiles can’t quite match.
Totally agree, the tangible aspect cannot be imitated by anything digital.
I've also discovered that breaking down tasks into micro-tasks helps me get going on things. I've found that I get easily overwhelmed if I have a massive list of things to get done, and adding another task to it makes it even worse. However, just nesting tasks into parent tasks and finding the right "child" to place a new task in makes it feel more manageable, and I know that those nested tasks are typically small things that I can accomplish.
I use this system for my projects but I don't rely on any software other than a text editor. I like the app demo shown at the end of the article, but I find custom software never feels fast enough for jotting down tasks in the right place within a hierarchy as compared with a text editor. I just use a markdown file with indented lines to indicate nesting level. Once I complete a task, I put an x within a little box, like "- [x] bug: page layout ..."
It's very satisfying when you have a big task that's a little abstract and overwhelming at the start, but over time gets more and more subtasks as you dig into it, and then those subtasks get closed out one by one, leading you to finally close out the top-level task that started it all. The fact that the text of the subtasks remain also gives a quick indication just how big that task really was. (I don't delete completed tasks, but I do move them somewhere else in the file to keep it organized somewhat.)
I completely relate to what you are saying. I do not use Markdown, but I use Notion because I find it just a little more convenient. But with my software, I am actually trying to reach the same speed as Markdown for advanced users. I have coded dozens of keyboard shortcuts to handle all the actions.
The keyboard shortcuts should help a lot! If you can nail navigation from the keyboard, it'll go a long way to make the UX feel breezy.
I made a corkboard/index cards app for Mac and iOS called Card Buddy and I spent a lot of time working on the keyboard navigation there and it made a huge difference on the feeling of fluidity. For instance, even while you're editing a card, you can navigate to a neighboring cell and start editing it just through the arrow keys. That makes it super fast to jot down lots of notes right away. I noticed a lot of other apps would require you to move the mouse and double-click to edit somewhere else and even that friction makes those apps feel sluggish.
My worry about any new system, todolist, app etc is that when the initial busy of energy wears off I'll be back to square one. The novelty and energy that I have at the start is impossible to maintain, but I need novelty to engage with tasks
I wrote this article precisely because, for once, I found a system that actually sticks. I have been using it every day for six months, whereas other systems would last a week at most.
Having not thought about it at this level, the feedback loop explains why my Bullet Journal works well for me. I can write down any task and break it down to any level of detail without worrying about software, which is nice, and I get a nice little reward when I cross off a bullet. I have used post-its in this way in the past and found that it's more effective than the bullet journal if I need a real kick in the pants. Also I move around a lot between home, office, and work trips. While post-its don't travel well, the phone apps just don't work for me.
When I need to coax my kids (7 and 10) into completing a tedious list of chores, like cleaning their room and playroom, practicing their instruments, and doing their homework, I also reach for the post-its. They each get their own color and we talk through the best way to break things down, arrange them in a backlog on the wall, set a timer, and agree to meet when the timer goes off to review our progress.
I also had good results with bullet journaling, but I had consistency issues. The advantage of the ticket printer is that it is much quicker to print. But I also have the advantage of working from home, so I do not need two separate systems.
Thank you for your very interesting message!
Thermal paper used for receipts is coated with endocrine disruptors. Touching them every day multiple times can decrease your testosterone levels. At least Rhonda Patrick says so: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/isteK4uQhQA
There was a study in Korea that showed it transfers into the body for folks like cashiers who handle them all day (gloves help prevent transfer). Besides lowering testosterone in men, these endocrine disruptors can have lots of other negative side effects.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20180524/the...
There are receipt paper options that don't have these compounds, but they are uncommon.
> Imagine an FPS where you only meet an enemy every 30 minutes. That wouldn't be engaging. The loop must repeat quickly to keep you interested.
False! Plenty of horror games have basically nothing happen most of the time but are very engaging (perhaps even too much so). Alien games are my go to example.
If you're comparing multiplayer esports shooters, why not compare to multiplayer horror games like Lethal Company or REPO? I love those games and have played them for hours and hours. And these are games where you meet enemies infrequently.
The pre-canned single player horror games like Amnesia or whatever are what you're talking about.
In REPO it can be 10 minutes until you see an enemy, then if you kill it, the respawn timer is like 10 minutes. Towards the end of levels things get much more frantic, but if you're fast you genuinely can do multiple levels without even seeing enemies.
Anyway I agree horror can't be replicated, it's not like I'm scared after I know all of the enemies, what they do, and what affects respawn times.
I am not a mental health professional. But author may be suffering from mild depression and burnout. Vacation from electronics, online life and doing some of their hobbies would help a lot
Yes, I thought about it, but I was afraid I might hurt myself stupidly one day :p
Interesting system. There is also a simpler idea, that works well for some people: at the end of each day, leave something simple and easy undone. Use it as a starting point for your work the next day. Doing that simple task gives you the initial momentum to start work the next day.
I learned how to gamify work tasks from my mom.
She worked as a librarian in the seventies. Tasks like restacking books was not fun, so she turned it into a game. Her coworkers, on the other hand, drew out the boring tasks as long as possible. When it came time to pick someone for advancement, they chose my mom, because she was more productive at the menial tasks.
I also use post-it notes, but if I used them for everything, I don't think it would work for me. The reward is in pulling down the note and setting the wall cleaner. But if I were to add notes every day, I have a feeling the effect would be disheartening. Similarly, I love getting the living are clean, but when kids/family make a mess again within hours, I'm less incentivized.
That is why I use a ticket printer, to make sure I can start fresh every day without having to spend dozens of minutes creating my post-its by hand.
Great read. I'm sure I have some undiagnosed ADHD and I suffer from getting stuck into to work or executive dysfunction...the tactile effect of pulling the receipt paper down and chucking it in the bin must feel very satisfying.
Kinda like those chefs working the plating section. Order up!
That is exactly the case! It gives me the feeling that my "digital" work becomes "real".
I've implemented something similar (but digital-only) which has been working for me lately. I have a script running continuously that monitors my Obsidian files for new due tasks, and whenever it detects one due today, it sends it to my notifications server. Now I have a notification for each thing I need to do today, which I keep up on my device(s) until I've completed the task, and then I clear it.
I am a compulsive notification-clearer so this mostly works for me. But I also have a receipt printer and have thought about doing something like this before, so I appreciated the ideas in the article! Maybe I'll rip up some scrap paper and try it that way (or just send the tasks to my printer instead of my notifications server, haha).
I am glad I was able to inspire you. A paper task is even harder to forget than a notification :P
Unless I stuff the note in my pocket and promptly forget it, but my phone/computer is always nearby :) Maybe the notifications are best for things I have to do out in the real world and the paper is better for sitting and doing things in one place.
> A simple solution is breaking tasks into smaller parts. Let's take an example everyone can relate to: cleaning the house.
Cleaning the house is fundamentally boring. It doesn't matter how many parts you split it into lexically — it's just inherently boring.
I try to frame it as meditative. I can think about other stuff while I wash dishes. It can be a nice break from work, while actually being less boring than a normal break because you still have something to do.
Cleaning the entire house is first and foremost a gigantic task that many people tend to procrastinate. Cleaning your desk, on the other hand, is quick to do and much less likely to be put off.
I made a strict rule years ago that I only listen to my favourite podcast while cleaning. This works for me surprisingly well.
Coming to this a day late, but what immediately jumped to mind was David Seah's "Task Order Up" https://davidseah.com/node/the-task-order-up/ system.
My biggest concern (besides "following through with this? hollow laugh") is when you're not always working in the same place - either hybrid or going to customer sites.
I just re-implemented your interface for managing tasks:
Prints on A4 page as I like it better
I like it! For me, I can confirm that the smaller the task, the less likely it is for me to procrastinate on it. I also didn't know that receipt printers don't need ink, that's cool. On a similar note: me and my partner recently also started using an app that divides up the household chores into small tasks and schedules them for us (e.g. "today you have to vacuum the living room"). For us, this prevents conflicts and also frees the mind of having to keep track of those things.
Thanks for your comment! I have the same question as hyperific — which app are you using?
There is also one that is called "tody" that we didn't try out. Both require a small subscription fee though, which I really dislike. I wish I had found a nice open source alternative. Besides the subscription fee (which was like 18€/year for us both), I have no complaints yet about the app.
I have been TickTick for daily-habit tracking for years now. It has a monthly GitHub-like graph widget for phones which is amazing for feedback. I also use TickTick for misc. task-tracking like "laundry", "buy apple", etc.
Then for non-recurring areas like job-tasks, I use a separate tool with a simple Kanban board. Prior to Kanban, I used to just track time, and write a list of things I did for the day, but I realized there was no feedback and it was just a passive "I did this stuff".
So coming from that, a Kanban board has been god-sent. Because otherwise Parkinson's Law was a common occurrence for me. Each task in the board is somewhat tied to a project/outcome through a tag. So there is a feedback/working-backwards/active concept to it. I have just started using it, but the more I use it, the more I automatically learn how to set better tasks, because otherwise they do not go from TODO -> DOING -> DONE.
I am a developer and I actually struggle with this myself. That is why I use the app I showed in the video in the article. When I get stuck on a task, I break it down into smaller tasks. But at first, I only write basic logical steps. I do not try to plan my whole day in advance because that usually leads to failure.
And if something is really hard to plan ahead, like doing research, I can create 5 minute tickets.
Yeah I do the time “ticket” concept for this, I create a timer. But I do have hard time jumping to create these tasks.
To me I sometimes see past these patches for my problem, which is a pain threshold that I need to resist running away from when facing a complicated problem, and why is there pain at all? It all becomes a math equation where you have a better thing to do vs the one you are doing and how to rework your mind to calculate it differently
Not bad. I have a stack of unused index cards. I just tried writing down some recurring household chores, one per card, with some instructions below the title. I'm now thinking of hanging two boxes -- todo, and done -- in the hallway, so that I can just pick up a task, complete it and then move the card from "todo" to "done". I suspect the wife will have no trouble moving the full stack from "done" to "todo" at the end of each week.
Ah, the idea of the two boxes is super interesting!
Your wife will have the easiest and most satisfying task :p
Thanks for the tip. I struggle with my procrastination all the time. I use software like OmniFocus to breakdown my tasks and merge them into the projects, yet it never occurred to me to use the receipt printer for that. And your idea of using the jar for completed tasks is really nice.
Have you ever thought of assigning priorities to your tasks (like Eisenhower matrix or Franklin-Covey)?
The analogy to video games and the need for fast, tangible feedback really lands for me. But I do wonder how sustainable is the receipt printer setup? The novelty and fun factor are real, but do you think you’d still get the same motivation after six months, or will it just become another background habit? (Not that "good habits" are bad, of course)
> I plan to release my software publicly in the coming weeks. You can subscribe to my newsletter to get notified when it's available.
i think a fun challenge for any new vibecode tool youve heard of but havent tried is to just make this. it cant be that hard... (famous last words)
I've found that having tasks last 10 minutes is an activation energy economizer (with option to extend 2x10 or 3x10 if in flow). It also simplifies the overhead of deciding how long something should take. I think the key takeaway from it all is that one would benefit most from iterating on their system of choice, keeping what works and carrying it forward, instead of doing impassioned rip-ups or switching to entirely new systems frequently
> Modern games provide much stronger feedback. Now, when you hit an enemy, you might see:
> the crosshair briefly changes to confirm the hit, damage numbers pop up above the enemy, sound effects, enemy death animations, a progress bar filling up, a new skill unlocked, random reward and more...
I wonder if we can gamify todo apps in the same way, most are too boring and too corporate. It should implement all gaming bells and whistles for ensuring you complete your tasks.
Habitica. "Destructomatic" paper tracker: https://davidseah.com/2005/11/task-progress-destruct-o-matic...
It is coming along more and more. But I think the core is being able to handle a lot more tasks, and therefore being able to easily break them down into smaller ones. That is really the heart of the game loop.
I am working on an app!
I'm going to try and see if this works better for me. The daily printout of "things that need to happen today" is a fun idea, especially if I could keep it by my bed and have it print off when my alarm goes off.
Are there any receipt-style printers that can directly print some kind of sticky note? I feel like that would be even more useful since you don't have to keep pins around, though I can see the running cost getting a lot higher
As uxamanda said, you can use shipping label printers.
Personally, with receipt-style tickets, I print them and make a small stack. I usually go through them in the same order.
But I can also use a small clip.
I would be worried that shipping labels might be a bit too sticky haha. I'll shop around and see what my options are
Oh yeah, I don’t think you’ll be able to remove them. If you’re referring to the photo I included in the article, it’s actually just not a good idea. I only stuck the tickets on a vertical surface to get a good photo.
sticking the shipping label to a sticky note might be the quickest solution
> The rule is simple: the more you procrastinate on a task, the more you should break it down into micro-tasks, even ones that take just 2 to 5 minutes in extreme cases.
This breakup alone could allow someone who can procrastinate on something big but doesn't like to be burdened by many tasks the shortcut, without further gamification, of performing some micro-tasks either to reduce the queue or to "procrastinate" on the rest.
> Write each task on a sticky note. When you finish the task, crumple the note into a ball and throw it into a clear jar.
I independently stumbled upon this same system. It sounds like the author takes it further than me (I don't create notes for routine/repeating tasks, and don't break them down so much—in a typical day I only complete around 2-3 notes).
I've used sticky notes for years, but ~6 months ago added the jar (prior to that I just recycled them). It helps to have a visual reminder that I'm making progress over the long term, even if it doesn't feel like it some days.
My current jar is just about full and I've been debating what to do with it. Save it as desk art? Find a bigger jar and transfer the notes? Burn them in a cathartic ritual? I'm open to suggestions.
My gf and I are the stereotypical software nerd meets astrology girlie (but doesn't take it too far). She likes to do rituals every so often and I've found that it does create a moment of reflection that you can use however you like. The last time we were camping she told me she wanted to do one so I bought some of that fire color changing powder (mostly just fine metal shavings of various types) and then glued a bit of that on some paper and made sort of a paper packet and then I had the whole group write on a packet something they wanted to let go of and then we all tossed them into the fire at the same time and the fire changed colors. It was pretty magical and I scored a lot of brownie points! So you could sprinkle some of that into your jar and just toss a handleful into the fire and watch the magic of your productivity ascend to the heavens. Or, you know, just watch physics at work.
Oh this sounds amazing! This reminds me of a todo list app some indie dev has been running for years which has a ton of configuration parameters based on various psychological models for productivity. There were options for gamification, Getting Things Done, task breakdown. It was kind of expensive. Does anybody remember the name of this software? I’ve been trying to remember for a while.
I think most competent games innately flashes you your progress constantly(levels, maps, story progress, upgrades) and also how easy you can start making progress after you started playing. This system is exactly doing that with the see through jar of finished micro sub tasks. In theory you can create your own “easy progress” flasher system that is tailored to you and would achieve this.
Get on it lol
This is immediately one of my favourite articles of all-time. It's well-written, visually appealing, and the subject matter is absolutely down my alley. I might actually just buy one and try this out.
I absolutely love how you show and tell, by having an article with an EXP system. But when do I get skill unlocks? I'm really hoping to be able to enjoy your next article with upgrades.
Thank you for your comment, it really means a lot to me! I put so much time (and heart) into making it that a comment like yours is the best reward I could ask for.
Haha, I’m planning to make a real mini-game for an upcoming article!
Thermal printer paper is known to be a source of BPAs making this a potentially harmful way to produce hard copies of your todo list entries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_printer#Health_concern...
Bisphenol-free paper does exist, you just need to make sure you are using the right kind.
For me, the keys are:
Break down tasks into micro-tasks. Doesn’t have to be written down.
Get my body involved. Take handwritten notes when reading.
Create micro-deadlines. Have short meetings with colleagues to share progress.
Inject mini-rewards. Do one 20-minute task. Then watch one music video on YouTube.
I could see room for a productivity app that smoothed out this workflow.
Yes, but it is very difficult because in the end we all have slightly different workflows. But I have a few interesting ideas that I hope people will like soon :)
Is there a name for organizing things based on bite-size? I have something similar system for myself but literally use a text file with dashes. I tried workflowy and other tools but I keep coming down to using text files because of how fast it helps me to offload memory on a scratchpad.
Task chunking, task breakdown. I could not find any app for that, and that is exactly why I created my own software, which I hope to release soon.
I've wanted a receipt printer for years just for giggles, after doing some custom integrations with them in medical labs. It turns out F**book marketplace in my area has some for movie night prices, just in case someone else is thinking along the same lines..
People are intimidated by large tasks because they're thinking about the entire task all at once. This blog post points out the key element which is that you have to think about small easy tasks instead. Once you move your focus to small easy sub-tasks, it becomes much easier to start doing them because it's not hard.
The truth of the matter (especially with ADHD or HFA people) is that once you even start doing a small sub-task, you then quickly become addicted to or motivated to getting more and more of it done, and before you know it, you've gotten many sub-tasks done or even accomplished a large task you'd been procrastinating about.
I used to sit in front of my task list and just stare at it. Then I tried the author’s approach and broke everything down into tiny game-like tasks. I printed each one on a little receipt printer. Every time I finished one, it felt like taking down a small boss, tear it off, and toss it. Suddenly the task list felt way less intimidating and much more efficient. Surprisingly, the ritual worked. I was able to stick to it and even started to get a small sense of accomplishment every day. Definitely more productive than my old habit of tackling huge chunks at once.
I actually have pretty bad procrastination myself. For example, I can easily spend half an hour watching short videos without losing focus, but when it comes to cleaning my apartment, I just can't get started. Usually I only start cleaning when the mess gets too overwhelming to ignore. I guess the receipt printer works kind of like a constant physical reminder that something is still unfinished. Digital task lists feel too abstract and easy to postpone, but small interventions in the physical world can sometimes be surprisingly effective.
Same here. Going through dozens of post-its feels super wasteful. Even more so the dozens of thermal printers that will be ordered as a result of this post, and might end up gathering dust on someone's attic in two weeks.
Ultimately there's going to be a lot of repetition. Many of these tasks are going to be the same. I'm wondering if there's a variant of this system that involves reusable kanban tickets.
If games work, why not gamify your idea? The printer and paper approach doesn't work well for people on the move. We need a pure online version that's accessible from everywhere: home, office, customer sites, vacation spots, and during commutes. Even better: add a voice interface too.
"Hey assistant, what do I have to do?"
"1. Send email to Bob"
"2. Clean your desktop"
"3. Read paper XYZ"
"...and more"
"OK assistant, set 1 as done"
"Congratulations, great job! You achieved the bronze badge this week by completing 70% of your tasks!"
I've been thinking gamification of my daily chores too and this article pops up! Amid health concerns of receipts, I think I'm gonna try this with just sticky notes and a jar. But how about making this a platform on its own, that just runs on a secondary monitor (I think everyone has one of those nowadays anyway). The idea is to just make this a GAME. For example, various stats of a player can be shown, history of every achievement, goals, chapters etc. Great article by the way!
Nice piece. You and I (and I know many others) have come to the same conclusion: (an old video of mine on breaking down tasks into tiny bites https://youtu.be/b3blsuTqN9s?si=W373y92JzDfHIDvS). No doubt informed by our good friend David Allen.
Ps, I linked to your article in my newsletter this week. Hope it sends some visits!
A colleague shared her productivity tool: Sticky Notes. She has them on her screen with the more immediate items listed on a sticky on the top right side of her screen. The one on its left has higher level / bigger items, and so on (a decimal system?). Her focus is on clearing out the top right one, and disassembling the higher level ones towards the right.
Postscript: Installing it on my laptop needed going through some IT bureaucracy. And my #1 procrastination creator is filling out forms. Guess they'll just keep paying me the same for less work.
The problem with methods like this is that there is no priority and rewards you for doing tasks that don’t actually matter. It’s better to do one really important thing per day than 10 meaningless tasks.
Perhaps for some, but the entire point of the article was about building momentum. She didn't talk much about the bigger tasks, but frequently alluded to getting more "real work" done. If you find yourself never getting thoae bigger tasks with this method, then yeah you've got to keep thinking, but that doesn't make it a "problem".
I have been procrastinating for a very long time about trying Emacs :P
I already replied to part of this in another message, which I am reposting here:
It makes the task tangible. You will have a much harder time ignoring your tasks if they are physically on your desk. Tearing up the ticket and putting it in a transparent jar adds an extra layer of satisfaction.
You are right, crossing off an item on your to-do list is a form of feedback. But having it on paper and throwing the paper into a transparent jar makes the feedback even stronger. If you look at the first part of my article, modern video games strengthen feedback loops much more than they used to.
As for list indentation, it may work well for many people, but not for me. I deal with very large and complex lists, with many levels. If I use one single indented list, I end up with a task list that is too long to be pleasant or practical to use.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned that these paper tickets have BPAs: Beat Procrastination Abilities.
On a serious note, the article so cool and well written. I appreciate demonstrating the gamification effect right on the page. When I finally get a receipt printer for tasks, I hope to implement timed reminders that print throughout the day.
And to be clear, I don't mean yet-another-source-of-notification-overload, I mean things like "Go eat lunch." Maybe some can relate to how helpful and delightful that might be :D
> The only way I could get things done was by relying on stress, coming from clients or financial pressure. That worked for a while, but it cost me my health (I burned out)
I’ve seen this called something like “using your adrenaline as adderall”
https://www.reddit.com/r/adhdwomen/comments/1ifdwwn/youve_be...
Any recommendation for a good thermal printer that works with macOS? This thread gave me a few ideas that I might hyper fixate on and then forget about in the span of a day or two.
Author here. It’s my first article. I’m a bit nervous but excited to get your feedback. If you deal with procrastination too, I hope this method helps you like it helped me.