A receipt printer cured my procrastination
(laurieherault.com)1229 points by laurieherault 6 days ago
1229 points by laurieherault 6 days ago
I had a similar experience when I decided to use a pencil and paper, along with a few simple rules, to manage my to-do lists. This method worked so well for me that I started thinking about the reason for its success. These are my conclusions:
- It was MY method
- It was simple enough to fit entirely within one piece of thought
- It provided a clean feedback loop when I could strikeout the completed task
- I like handwriting
So it relied on things that my brain finds pleasurable
An A5 squared spiral notebook and a 4-colour pen was perfect for me. Spirals help as a lefty. They also allow to cleanly detach a page.
There's a lot of freedom with this. It can serve a much more than just writing boring task names.
It’s such a great idea. I have a giant metal whiteboard I’ve been using for post-it’s for a few years, I am always having to move them around because they are at “project” granularity, and things get recaregorized or reprioritized, to the point that it’s mostly useless. Going to try this!
The idea is precisely to use our daily tasks to build momentum for the more difficult ones.
I've always been a list maker. It feels good to put a check mark next to a finished item. I once read an article declaring that list making can turn into a form of bondage. I thought this might have value, so I quit making lists. This was a mistake, because without the list I had problems prioritizing tasks. (And I'm a little forgetful.) Things get done when I list.
Great article and great system.
A little out of scope since the article wasn’t about the finer points of ADHD but I’ve always wondered if we’re being disingenuously hard on ourselves by labeling it a disorder.
So many people show the symptoms and they’ve only gotten worse as the world has become more complicated that it seems less like a problem with the individual and more like an natural effect of putting what are essentially still caveman brains in a world of flashing lights, vibrating phones and notification noises.
Your remark is very interesting. I was recently thinking that ADHD is kind of like an allergy to the modern world.
Agree with both. I’m undiagnosed and slowly wondering if I have it the more I see exact language matchups to what feels to be a very hard to describe experience.
Puts me in a tricky spot as I experience similar descriptions of the problems, and I deeply resonated with deliberately seeking out stress as a fix, which I realized worked over time. I have specifically done this.
That said, that’s an unhealthy approach via playing with fire (missed deadliness, etc) and the over time negative impacts of stress.
That said, I am firmly in the camp that some or a lot of modern ADHD is caveperson brain finally DDoS’ing itself via too much info throughput. We hit a max ingest limit sometime in 2013, and it never got better. Some folks loose their mind very publicly online, others live and die in tech jobs via if they can manage tabs and attention properly. Not a bad outcome vs worst case, if the latter is my case.
So where does that leave me - I go on modern era drugs with what seems to be life-long requirement bc of modern era tech decisions I never agreed to? This seems wrong in 10 different directions. To start if I can barely maintain control over what goes into my mind and attention for reasons I didn’t agree to but must adapt to, at least I can control if I put new problems, fixing other problems, into my body.
So… needless to say receipts sound like a cool method to test. At least it was nice to see others discuss the exact buzzwords I think to myself - I can pay attention there, but god f’ing dang it why can’t I do it over here?
got hit hard by that jar thing. just plain receipts piling up. no fancy tracking, no filters, it's not even a todo list, it's a physical backlog you can't mute. stack grows, pressure builds. brain stops negotiating. most tools hide your mess with tabs and swipes. this one prints your laziness and puts it in a jar. that's brutal. that's honest.
this sticky notes method likely works well when it comes to breaking down tasks into small pieces. I struggle on that sometimes but I think I struggle more when the task is inherently boring like exercise with long (boring) rest periods or the outcome is uncertain, like working on software with no users. In this case I think I would procrastinate on making the sticky notes too
Let me give you a concrete example. I have one ticket per exercise I need to do. A 20 minute workout session equals about 4 to 6 tickets.
It is easier to get started when the task is very small.
But I also used to procrastinate a lot with post-its. That is why the ticket printer is the perfect solution for me.
> If later in the day you notice you're starting to procrastinate, immediately return to the system.
This is by far the most insightful advice backed by actual research.
Recognizing a deviation in your desired behavior and having a prepared fallback plan for how to get back on track.
Could be as simple as - if I catch myself scrolling on the phone I will put the phone down and standup.
Your blog reminded me of “Linear RPG”: you run along a line to collect XP. It’s a flash game.
Super cool idea !! Todo list tend to be kinda overwelming, because cross out an item leave it on the list. I tried to do a todolist (on a text editor) and just delete the element when it's done, but it's far less satysfing than juste throwing it in a glass
First some feedback (I see the author is interested), and then a personal take on how I deal with this stuff.
As someone who has spent decades procrastinating, reading about systems to get things done, trying many of them, working with coaches and mentors, and teaching project management, I like to think have a cultivated interest in the topic. I’m very happy that the author found something that works for them. I’m not a gamer, so I didn’t find the comparison particularly relatable. What I did find relatable was the point about getting the dopamine hit (I know that’s debated, but let’s use it as a metaphor) off crumpling up the paper and throwing it away. That’s something I always found gratifying about a physical board full of sticky notes, and it’s just not as rewarding to mark a ticket done in Jira.
In my personal experience of ADD, novelty is a major motivator. A system like this has the appeal of all sorts of new sources of stimulation - physical objects, a new electronic toy, software to write, etc. The problem is that once that wears off, if I’m only doing it for the novelty, I won’t stick with it. I need to engage some of the other sources of motivation (interest, challenge, urgency).
Also, I would love to see someone write an article like this where they keep it entirely in the first person. In other words, focus on “my experience” and “I do this” and “this works for me”. I experience a sort of automatic pushback when I read things like “this will help you” or “you need to”. It may be linked to demand avoidance, or just my belief that there is not a single productivity system or hack that works for everyone. “You need to” try things out, reflect on your own personal struggles, and tailor the solutions to fit. Also, I’m not sure if I would ever call it a cure.
Something I’ve found very helpful is an app called Llama Life. It is not free, so stop reading if that’s a deal breaker. I think of it as kind of a pomodoro timer that someone cleverly fixed for me. I find pomodoros appealing, but they never worked for me. With Llama Life, I stack up what I plan to do for the day along with a guess at how long each task will take. The first benefit this has is that I know what I’m meant to be working on. And when the timer goes off, if I’m not done, I can snooze or extend it, or cut my losses and move on. The other thing I like is that it shows me the total amount of time I’ve allocated, and when each item ends. This helps me to avoid overcommitting: when I look at the end time and see 9:30 at night, I’m forced to reevaluate and cut some things. Anyway, I’m a happy customer.
Thank you :)
It is a piece of software I developed myself using Tauri. The only major difficulty is that you need to send a specific format to these printers. But there are plenty of libraries that make it fairly easy to do.
I do not use tickets with bisphenol (it is banned in Europe).
Won't comment on the procrastination aspect (if it works for her, that's great), but handling thermal receipt paper a lot is unhealthy according to some. I would want to use a plain-paper impact printer despite the noise that they make.
Okay why not…
One part that is not addressed is procrastination because of tasks that are scary.
I think I have fairly low levels of anxiety in general, but there are things I know I need to do but I’d just rather ignore them because they somehow terrify me.
Things like “call someone to negotiate a price”, or “find a holiday place to rent when I know it’s already too late”, or “reverse-engineer what this giant pile of untested legacy code does, rebuild it in something else, and make sure everything works like before”.
I am 100% sure I’d rather let the receipt printer take a day off than tackling any of these.
Seriously. I'm so jealous of people who only need to do things that are so tractable that splitting them creates a series of microtasks that are all easy, rather than a series of distracting trivialities that mean nothing without actually accomplishing the one thing that I really don't want to do.
This is a great, simple breakdown of how to improve motivation. I would love to have this at home!
Try the method using just post-it notes and see if it works for you :)
That’s really clever. I have never thought of a thermal printer before to spam out tasks.
something that I did some time ago, if the printer is able to print images, you can generate an HTML page, screenshot it and than print it. The print will be much better and you can play with a lot more things
Yes, it is possible, but if you print directly from the browser, you cannot tell the printer when to cut.
In my case, I generate multiple images and tell the printer when to cut. I also have another version without images. The difference between the two is that the version without images is two to three times faster to print.
Thanks for taking the time to read and give me feedback!
I wrote 12 different versions to try to be shorter, but I was losing way too much information that I thought was important to understand why this method works.
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.
I am working on my app to break tasks down into smaller tasks (you can see it in the video at the end of the article). I think I will release it in the next few weeks :)
I am the author, and thank you for your comment!
What I am talking about is really very different from the Pomodoro method. That method uses 25-minute sessions, while I am talking about micro-tasks of 2 to 5 minutes printed on receipt tickets.
As for todo.txt, I mentioned in the article that this kind of tool with a hierarchy does not work for me at all, given the massive number of tasks I have. And I proposed a more interesting and truly innovative solution in response to that :)
I accidentally found an effective speedup tracking tasks to be done. Normally we make Github issues and Pull-requests to fix them with long descriptions in both.
Instead made a single issue with a table and each row having an emoji, item title, and when complete link to the fix. As new items were identified I added a row with emoji for 'not started'. Had emoji's were 'under construction', 'already done above', 'not needed', etc. This snowballed with me completing one item per day over 30 days until it was all done. I'm called it EDD Emoji-Driven-Development.
Hi Laurie, reading your article, I'm wondering to myself, maybe I should copy this, and add a Duolingo aspect to it, the first feature I can think of is a button (near the printer, or a virtual one on the app) that is basically "Give me a random task". Duolingo also has lessons (where the learner has to complete several questions), and maybe a "lesson" can be a big task, that encompasses its subtasks.
Taskwarrior maybe?
In Sleek (todo.txt for linux) I can have multiple txt with multiple context inside.
On the other hand, I don't think pomodoros are strictly 25 minute sessions. I can setup any structure in my pomodoro app of choice Solanum and chain sessions.
You just need to switch of job, if you don’t feel rewarded when doing it then it’s just not the right fit for you. And even then, something fun can become boring later on.
I know electricians for instance who love doing their stuff, so they have no issue in being motivated, while they were a mess in their previous work field.
And vice versa.
It’s not always possible of course, but the solution is not to ‘gameify’ your life, it will only work for a little while before getting bored of it.
And for the « home » task, I believe it’s more of a routine. If you know every Saturday morning will be to clean the whole house, you just do it without thinking much.
I think it's great that you don't have executive dysfunction. That's not the case for me, and obviously not for the author.
If you've never had your dream job yet still wasn't able to do shit, you don't have to crack down on other people's attempts to become functioning members of society.
I do have issue tho, that’s the reason I’m saying that. I can’t concentrate at all on something that isn’t interesting to me to the point where I needed 4 hours to learn basic trigonometric algorithms when I was a kid.
Call it adhd or something else, my point is that doing something interesting is 99% of the solution.
It’s like poker, when you got a bad hand you deal with it. Play on your qualities, not on your flaws.
I believe it would be closer to saying to find what he likes to do and change his life so that he replaces what he doesn’t like with what he likes.
That’s problem solving.
Because we are all hooked on a few games that have a better gameplay loop and tons of feedback, with a touch of random and intermittent rewards :)
My problem is that when I use an LLM to break a task into smaller steps, it is often not exactly how I would have done it. But maybe that is because in my line of work, it is difficult to feed all the right parameters into the system for an effective breakdown.
“actional tasks” but the printer is kind of fun. You need a “manager” / planner / architect in order to create those tasks though.
Clarity is key
I've never understood why people have "work procrastination" problems. I've never had to play games to get myself to do work. You're paid to do a job, so do the job. Is this a generational thing and is it really that big of a problem?
I've worked remotely since 2016-ish and still can't comprehend why this is an issue.
Not everyone's wired the same. A close family member was diagnosed with ADHD and he describes his battles with procrastination as if there was a glass wall stopping him from doing whatever he was meant to be doing. So easy for someone else to say "what's the big deal? Just do it!".
I understand ADHD and mental illness can make this extremely difficult, if not possible. You make a good point.
The type of procrastination I was referring to wasn't related to that. It was related to the idea of work being more optional than required and seems much more prevalent that\n the % of the population that struggles with the above.
The progress bar along the bottom of the page (in mobile at least) is fun
What does it say about me that I stopped reading the article to play with the progress bar down at the bottom right?... And now I'm writing this comment before finishing the article.
That says a lot about you, unfortunately :P But hey, who cares, you killed a dragon!
> It's harder to procrastinate on something physically in front of you.
Oh you sweet summer child.
I opened this is another tab and will now procrastinate to read it for a few weeks.
> Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate when writing an email?
OK I got a bit triggered by this sentence. Not at TFA, but sharing my own experience: Games are fun. And I don't mean Type 1 vs Type 2 fun and the email is somehow type 2 fun. I mean that the stimulation / "hit" from a game is just higher than 90-99%% of work tasks (writing a new CLI or optimizer excluded!!). We pile on much stimulation to the work to get it to hit harder: Working by others (social/peer), snacks (biological rewards), free caffeine, money (sometimes lots), etc. And physical trinkets.
We have studied this to death in other parts of our own biology, like food. Unhealthy food/drink is fun. It's a pleasurable reward sometimes, but if it forms the basis for your diet you are going to have a lot of trouble enjoying healthy stuff. You can't outrun a bad diet. You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down. You have to treat the underlying problem: A hugely stimulating / rewarding thing is displacing the healthy stuff. Almost every piece of sane health advice after 1900 has focused on removing unhealthy factors first.
Work/hobby is no different. When I'm obsessed with factorio (it happened a lot once or twice), I find it harder to focus on work. When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.
I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
> I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some.
This is one of my big objections do 2FA. My work has been pushing it hard, and from a security perspective, I get it. However, it’s all via an Authenticator app on the phone. We can no longer set down our phones and simply work. To start working, and periodically throughout the day, we are now forced to pickup our phones to authenticate. This invites the chance to see other notifications, check and app quickly, or more generally, break flow as we have to switch to another device and back again.
All of this seems like a suboptimal solution.
You should try a CLI-based workflow for 2FA. As long as you can exfiltrate the secret (and you often can by pretending you can't scan QR codes), then you can use oathtool to generate passcodes.
1. use 'pass' to save the secret: 'pass edit work.secret' <enter it and quit>
2. use oathtool to generate 2fa given a secret:
' #!/bin/bash
oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" >&1 '
use it like '2fa work'
If you have 'xsel' you can even do
'oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" | xsel -ib'
to copy it to clipboard automatically.
Even if you only have the QR code, you can download the image or screenshot it and then extract the secret without ever having to use a smartphone by using zbarimg and then manually extracting the secret from the URI:
sudo apt-get install zbar-tools oathtool
zbarimg qr-2fa-code.png
QR-Code:otpauth://totp/username?secret=ABCDEFSECRET012349BASE32&period=30&digits=6
I have this little one-liner mapped to a hotkey combo:
`bash -c 'xfce4-screenshooter -r -o zbarimg | gxmessage -title "Decoded Data" -fn "Consolas 12" -wrap -geometry 640x480 -file -'`
Works great if you have xfce4-screenshooter, gxmessage, and zbarimg installed. It allows you to draw a box around a screen region, screenshots it, decodes it via zbarimg, and pipes the output into a dialog box with copyable text.
Just to add, 'pass' has an otp extension to simplify this a bit [1]
With that, you can do
$ zbarimg -q --raw qrcode.png | pass otp insert <some-name>
$ pass otp <some-name> # or pipe to xsel
Heh, I use pass like this; but it's on my (Pine)Phone, so it doesn't solve the parent's original problem ;-)
Although the nice thing about CLI workflows is that I can easily run it by SSHing into my phone (just make sure you set up GPG so the passphrase prompt will appear in your terminal, and not as a popup on the phone!)
We also have Microsoft authentication that displays a number on the browser and asks you to enter in on the device! :-(
In my union contract we have language that requires the employer to provide us with a hardware 2FA token for just this reason. I and some of my coworkers don't use smartphones, and we didn't want to be obligated to use one for work.
"So long as [employer's] access management vendor... supports the use of physical two-factor authentication devices (for example, a YubiKey), [employer] shall make such devices available to Employees upon their submission of a request for the device."
I've worked in places that wanted to push cell phone apps on the team for auth and we also pushed for hardware tokens. It worked extremely well. The concerns we had were mainly centered on privacy since the app wanted location/camera access and apps can (or at least at the time could) get a ton of data from your device without requesting any permission at all like getting a list of every app you have installed, or data from sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, thermometer, etc.
I'm old enough to have lived through the era of standalone authenticators. The downsides of that approach are also numerous.
I understand where you're coming from though, and I think this is where OS features like Focus Modes come into play.
When I'm in a "Work" mode, I literally don't see notifications from most of my apps. They don't show up in the notification center, or on app icon badges, or anywhere.
This takes a few minutes to set up, but once it's in place, it's fantastic. I also do this for other aspects of my life: Photography, Research, etc. When I'm in those modes, I don't want to see anything except for the apps that are specific to what I'm doing. It's worth the effort of setting this up IMO, and extends far beyond just work.
Hmm. I wonder if there would be a market for a super simple TOTP authentication device with an e-paper display. Kind of like those RSA tokens with the LCDs, but more modern and able to hold any number of TOTP credentials.
Getting the credentials loaded could be a bit of a pain without a camera for QR code scanning. Easiest solution would be via Bluetooth to a companion app, which you would probably want anyway for periodic time sync (likely wouldn't be worth it to embed a GNSS receiver just to update the time).
Probably be a pretty small market, but as a niche Kickstarter device? I could see a small but loyal customer base.
Sounds like a job for a second phone, one which you'd just be extra careful to only use for one purpose. It can be cheap as balls, but it will have a QR-compatible camera and whatever else we may have come to expect from such a device. :)
Yup. Just use a secondary 5-year old phone for dirt cheap. I was actually considering doing it once, but the convenience takes a hit.
Make sure your GNSS receiver supports OSNMA, and be _extremely_ trusting of your battery-backed RTC and profoundly skeptical of time jumps over a certain magnitude.
GNSS spoofing is trivial now and it's an extremely useful way to manipulate a target device's idea of time, which breaks all sorts of things. (SSL certificate validity periods...)
This is nearly what you’re looking for (well, not that close, but it’s got the right spirit):
I would love this, but only if it also successfully implemented a few disparate authentication protocols that essentially do the same things (prove identity) but are regrettably proprietary - like the de facto standard electronic ID in Sweden, BankID.
Token2 make this: https://www.token2.com/shop/product/molto-2-v2-multi-profile...
They also do single-token cards: https://www.token2.com/shop/category/programmable-tokens
Have you tried a smart watch? The Duo 2FA app lets you add an arbitrary TFA code based authenticator with same QR code Google Authenticator supports and generate those from their Apple WatchOS [0] or Android WearOS apps. I have used it successfully for years, it's a huge reason I got an Apple Watch in fact. Now you'll have to configure your watch with a "work" focus mode that turns off all notifications and not install any fancy apps on the watch (do those still exist?), but it can free you from your phone.
Along the same lines the Meta Wayfarer[2] smart glasses lets you take slice of life photos and videos without needing to whip out your phone. You lose a ton of quality but stay in the moment more. The AI features are getting better so eventually you'll be able to use it for basic information lookup.
0 - https://guide.duo.com/apple-watch
I imagine Yubikey doesn't support all the stupid custom-app-2fa that companies push out.
I really wish they'd just stick to classic TOTP.
Check this out: https://github.com/Authenticator-Extension/Authenticator
Taking the 2 out of 2FA since 2017!</sarcasm>
Thanks for sharing a potentially useful tool but I will not use it without a lot more details about how this browser extension secures the 2FA secrets from sketchy websites/ads.
This is one of the thing that smart watches should be doing, or even better, something like https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2022-10-17-otp-on-wrist/.
I just use an old phone that I've wiped clean and removed the SIM. Sits on the desk and I just glance at it when I need a new 2FA code.
I imagine you've considered it already, but maybe your work would be willing to put the 2FA secret into something like 1Password, which you could access on your computer instead of your phone.
Defeats the purpose of 2FA though. I'd argue a cheap 2FA-only phone would be good, if they're struggling to touch their real phone without being consumed by distractions.
I carried 2 phones for many years. It was more trouble than it’s worth. Especially these days. Working from home, my only work use of the phone is for the Authenticator app.
The optics of that can be questionable. Just ask Skyler White or her brother-in-law.
Why does it have to be an app on your phone? IT should be able to support yubikeys (or similiar) and even printed OTP lists.
I see some evidence that yubikeys are used somewhere in the organization, but not sure where or how.
The only information we were sent to get this all setup was specifically for a phone. The portal that exists to add devices only appears to support phones.
I have a co-worker who simply tried to use Authy instead of MS Authenticator and it didn’t work. There is a lot of bureaucracy that typically makes it not worth the fight.
I use MS Authenticator for work too. It doesn't do standard TOTP, at least not for Entra. The QR codes don't contain the secret. IDK that anyone has been able to exfiltrate a secret and generate codes with a third party app.
I personally use an Android emulator on my laptop, which achieves the same goal. It saves and restores state automatically for quick startup.
You can use the Freedom app.
url freedom.to
Or just disable notifications. The iphone has a do not disturb mode that can be scheduled.
For Windows, here's a free little authenticator app that lives in your system tray: https://github.com/richard-green/Authentiqr.NET
These look swish https://www.reiner-sct.com/en/produkt/reiner-sct-authenticat...
Get a Yubikey or similar, have a USB port close, one finger tip, done.
Invest in a password manager that stores it all, including the rolling codes
do you use a pw manager? bitwarden (OSS) has it built in if you pay for premium. i think it's an extra 1-3/mo but well worth it to support the team
It's not your job's responsibility to cater to your lack of self control
Even doing nothing beyond the authentication, it is still requiring task switching, changes devices, waiting for codes, entering them, switching back. It’s very disruptive to any type of flow state.
I often trick myself imagining life is a game that throws boring or difficult tasks (boredom often equals difficult ) at me that I need to survive. It often helps because I I can picture finishing these things as rewards that help me get to the next "level". It was particularly helpful getting beyond difficult times (many bad events coinciding). Not sure if this can be transferred to others, or if it works because of my brain chemistry.
This stops working after a while. The real deal is you begin the realise the 'points' you accumulate playing this game can't be redeemed to do something fun or satisfying. This game begins to appear totally pointless as you age(Points are less useful as you age, and dying with lots of points means time and effort was spent to acquire a thing that can't be spent now). Which causes even more procrastination.
I think humans crave freedom and free time, with good health more than anything else. This frees you up to care about doing things which we feel more rewarding and fun.
Several times you are better off skipping the drills and rituals and just focus on making lots of money as quickly as possible. And of course competing to accumulate more money just for the heck of it is equally demotivating as well. Focus what you want from the money and that is likely to move you along better use of your time and effort.
> This stops working after a while.
yeah and i figured thats fine !
I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.
I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.
i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.
Yeah. Sometimes the reason you can't focus on something is that some part of your brain is trying to tell you that you shouldn't.
Unfortunately, that part of the brain usually sucks at coming up with an alternative plan, and "do something else, anything" is not very actionable. And you still need to pay your bills somehow.
The natural reward for work is work done. I don't need a motivational system to do the dishes. The motivation is seeing the dirty dishes gradually disappear, and the kitchen become cleaner. I don't need to create pieces of papers to represent that, because it is already happening right there, in real life.
If I work on a project, it helps to specify all things that need to be done (as opposed to working on something open-ended), so that I can see how I am getting closer to the moment of "done". A nice thing about test-driven development is that you produce a set of checkboxes first, and then you gradually check them off. Even if the work is open-ended, if I keep thinking about new features that would be nice add, it helps to specify a "version 1.0", and after achieving it, a "version 2.0", etc. The idea is that after each version I can take a break and feel that my work is done.
The least motivating thing is probably the job, as an employee. You work for 8 hours a day (generously assuming no overtime). There is no way to complete those 8 hours in e.g. 4 hours of working harder and then take a walk. In theory, if you do Scrum, you should have a certain reasonable amount of work assigned per sprint, and if you do it faster, then I guess you can take a short break and do something enjoyable (such as refactoring). In practice, almost no one does Scrum by the book; you will probably be randomly interrupted by extra tasks, and given unrealistic deadlines to avoid the possibility of completing the work earlier.
Another demotivating thing about the job is that there is no personal consequence of completing a project; you immediately start working on a new one. The natural response to completing a work is to congratulate yourself and take a break. But at work, the vacations are mostly unrelated to projects. Also, you are paid per time spent working, not by the number of projects finished. So it is all disconnected.
So I guess it all needs to be a part of some greater project, which can possibly be completed one day. Such as, putting your money in index funds, and planning to retire as soon as you reach a specified amount. Then each day you can congratulate yourself for getting 0.01% closer to the goal. (Or you can save money for other specific things, if that is what you desire.)
Or if you work remotely, lie. Complete your projects and do whatever you want with your newly minted free time. You still need to be available and maybe keep a status indicator green but otherwise you should be free to reclaim 10 - 20 hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Thoughts?
Really, most people's adult lives are just a constant stream of boring/difficult tasks they need to grind in order to get through: School, work, paying bills, managing money, doing taxes, cleaning the house, cooking food, doing dishes, fixing this, maintaining that... If you don't have a way to trick your brain into grinding these things over and over, you're not going to get very far.
This is the point I think many people fail to understand about consumption. Yes, it is usually perfectly sustainable to spend most of your free time scrolling tiktok or playing high-reward video games, yes you can live without regular exercise or a strict diet, but there are hard to quantify effects on an entire range of other things in your life. I think it is very important for the modern person to pay close attention to their mental state with and without the things they turn to the most, especially if experiencing problems with focus or motivation.
> You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down
Sorry for being off-topic, but you actually can (not a scientist, just speaking from experience). My guess is the digestion slows down and the sugar gets released into the system at a slower rate (probably because of the lower overall Glycemic index?). Anyways, it actually works! Just eat your salad before the ice cream to make sure it does :)
I think I do some of this, but my framing is not explicitly about adopting monastic practices - rather, it's about having a "novelty budget" each day. Every novel stimulus is an opportunity to careen off course.
However, if the task ahead of me is great and I'm motivated, then I automatically seek less novelty to focus on it. IOW, maintaining a boring baseline of routine so that novelty is selective is important as a way of being able to "jump into action". It's good to get off the phone. It doesn't replace the intrinsic motivation.
There's an aspect to productivity advice that is about shouting down your burnout by adding more productivity hacks or taking stimulants or flagellating oneself. Burnout's root cause has to be approached by asking the tougher questions about life and aligning with a philosophy that is truthful to that. The work itself will have moments of routine boredom, exhilaration, and heartbreak, but the motive has to endure all of it.
When you are feeling this way it's good to take stock of your 3 fundamentals... Food, Sleep, Exercise. If any are suffering, then it's almost guaranteed to be the source of your problem. It sounds elementary but I have to remind myself of this constantly. Particularly the sleep part
I posted in another thread how reliable some old/popular answers can be. Frustratingly so. :D
Exercise is annoying, as without a lot of modern life, it largely takes care of itself. Back when I could just walk to a grocery, as an easy example, it was unsurprisingly easy to stay in decent shape.
I find this intensely amusing. In grade school, I got "mono" and dang near literally slept for several days. Granted, being sick is a bit different than being disinterested.
My problem is typically more that there are plenty of more interesting things to do than anything I'd like to do right now.
> I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
Hard agree, and yes we have our vices, but wouldn't life be better if we had more agency over them?
My phone is overwhelmingly a detriment to my life, it's just disguised as a necessary utility by doing the same things I could do anyway if I didn't have it. It's not never uniquely valuable to me, but those rare signals don't need to be tightly coupled with so so so much noise.
The big one for me lately is the aptly named tethering. It's wild that it's not just built into my mac at this point, if it weren't for that, (maybe 2Fa as well) I'd leave the phone at home so often I'd probably forget about it, and I long for that future.
I don't even get that kind of hit from a game though unless playing with friends, and that's because I'm with my friends. If I was playing alone I'd play for 30 minutes max and then stop.
even the Gen Z and Gen Alpha have noticed this effect and came with their own term: Brain Rot.
>When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.
Man no offense but this sounds devastatingly sad. "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
Do you do drugs?
If not then you're already 'starving' yourself of the purest form of pleasure (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong). I don't think taking one step further is that sad.
I think this is more akin to literally starving yourself so that a single bit of spinach tastes great. It turns out you can in fact eat a candy bar and have pizza and not become obese or otherwise damage your health. It's not one or the other and OP might need some kind of professional help to mediate their moods...
Like this is clearly not healthy.
That’s insanely stereotypical. There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”.
Instead, there are many thousands of different substances which can elicit, heighten, prolong or enable pleasure; some illegal, some legal, some included in your favourite meals and snacks.
Even vanilla is a ”drug” which enhances pleasurable feelings. (Vanillin and ethylvanillin are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and consuming them will increase serotonergic and dopaminergic activity)
> We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good.
Much like people that struggle with their weight need to turn every meal into accounting for lean protein and leafy vegetables.
Eventually, you crave the broccoli a bit more than you used to, and it makes the diet easier.
I suppose in some sense, but how is this sadder than the reality that we're not all doped up on space cocaine?
A desirable (practical) reality would seem to stem not just from first order effects now, but also in summation of all the credits and debits that it leaves us over time.
> "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
Don't worry, that rule only applies to poor people!
.
More seriously, how long does it take to stop the dopamine high? Could we schedule our lives so that we would e.g. spend one month doing the most exciting things ever... followed by three days of meditation... which would make us ready for a few months of hard work... and then do it again?
You know, so that we are still productive at work, but don't have to sacrifice most of the joy in life to achieve that.
I agree with both of you, but when I am fasting and also doing activities with a high level of dopamine release, I actually find it easier to focus on my tasks as well.
> Man no offense but this sounds devastatingly sad. "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
Interestingly these seemed to be one of the messages of Severance, and Dylan's character even appeared to have ADHD
I don't want to be a downer on this because it sounds like a cool system, but it might be worth checking whats in the receipt paper as a lot of it is pretty bad for you:
https://toxicfreefuture.org/press-room/new-study-finds-toxic...
Yes, the main problem is the paper with bisphenol, which has been banned in Europe.
Even though bisphenol-A is banned in EU, I believe bisphenol-B is still allowed. I suspect - though I don't know how to research whether it's true or false - that everyone just switched to bisphenol-B, which is said to be either similarly, or more toxic than BPA... :(
Even assuming that "BPA-free" paper I'd buy is really so, and not just BPA-covered one imported from China and said/labeled to be "BPA-free" by someone somewhere in the pipeline...
You need to go out of your way to buy phenol-free paper. It's a thing but unfortunately it's a niche rather than the default.
If the labeling can be trusted it isnt hard to find phenol-free receipt paper on amazon.
However, none of them say what their actual 'active ingredient' is and I am curious if these are necessarily known to be better. Most of them describe themselves as 'plastic coated'.
I have ADHD, and my daughter was recently diagnosed as well.
Been reflecting on this post as it's been soaking up the front page for the last 24 hours.
I want to commend you for shipping maybe the perfect HN post:
- Personal Journey
- Old school hardware
- DIY software
- Productivity hack
- Great title
- Quantified results (2-3x productivity) over non-trivial duration (few months)
- A low-effort offline solution that delivers real value for the 98% who will never build the thing
- Great polish on the reading experience with lots of little details
- Effective call to action (subscribe to get the software in a few weeks)
You inspired me to get my organization back on track. After researching receipt printers for 30 minutes, I realized what I actually need is to dust off the system that has worked for me in the past. But I'm picking up some post-its today and my daughter and I are going to try implementing your system for her over the weekend.
Thank you for putting the time into this!
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.