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A receipt printer cured my procrastination

laurieherault.com

271–280 of 634 posts

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#271
post #80

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 tu…

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

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#272
post #209

How is this printer idea any different than a simple to do list? To break down tasks one can simply indent a list. A to do list gives feedback every time you cross an item of the list. Sticky notes and printers seem like exaggerated form of a todo list.

As far as I understood, the point is the physical feedback from crumbling the paper.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#274

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.

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 in…

Thank you so much for your comment, it means a lot to me!

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#276
post #266

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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#277
post #223

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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#279

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..

Good tip

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#280

> 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 t…

> 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 s…

Get a keyboard with a usb port on the side. Insert yubikey nano. Now instead of annoying 2FA you just reach your finger over and touch.
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