A receipt printer cured my procrastination

This article is so good! I applaud your efforts into making a change for your life for the better.

Liked you included one of many studies from M Csikszentmihalyi

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 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

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)

Good point, but luckily it's pretty easy now to find BPA free paper.

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.

You can buy phenol-free thermal paper, it’s about 20% more expensive where I live but much safer for you, and the quality is just as good.

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.

Yes, very true. It's paper with bisphenol. These papers are now banned in Europe, but not in the USA.

I find any system I create works really well because it's exciting and interesting, and then I get bored of the system, and it becomes ineffective.

You've put into words beautifully one of my main argument against getting a job.

I have a better one though: a job leaves almost no time or energy for actual work.

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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.

Is there any way of knowing, just by examining it, whether a given thermal paper is toxic or not?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I doubt it. Skeuomorphs make me think of ipods, Shadowrun and Papers Please.