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A receipt printer cured my procrastination

laurieherault.com

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Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#381

Post by standardUser »

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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#382

Post by CoopaTroopa »

laurieherault wrote: post #359
CoopaTroopa wrote: post #319

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!

Easiest achievement hunting I've ever done!

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#383

Post by NewJazz »

honzabe wrote: post #378

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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#384

Post by d--b »

jvanderbot wrote: post #65

> 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…

Playing sudoku is not fun at all, it’s Lumon-level shit work. Yet people definitely procrastinate on it.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#385

Post by uncircle »

Groxx wrote: post #341
uncircle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

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…

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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#386

Post by stared »

laurieherault wrote: post #2

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 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).

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#387

Post by jabroni_salad »

imtringued wrote: post #228
akavel wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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'.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#388

Post by gaudystead »

rozab wrote: post #52
cocothem wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the ink? What's the keyword to search for nom toxic printer ink/cartridge

Receipt printers don't use ink, instead they use thermal paper which darkens when heated. You can test this by scratching it with your nail, the heat is enough to leave a mark

I agree with you on the first part, but are you sure that the heat from the fingernail is what's leaving that mark? I can take a cold object and run it on the receipt paper to get the same effect, so I think that's a different mechanism at play but I'm open to being proven wrong.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#389

Post by dogman144 »

laurieherault wrote: post #131
ofjcihen wrote: post #129

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…

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?

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#390

Post by jascha_eng »

InitialBP wrote: post #256
BobaFloutist wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just remembering two passwords instead of one? And isn't two passwords instead of one basically the same as remembering one very long password? For that matter, how do they prevent you from using the same password for both?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259556 I posted another comment explaining why 1Password Vault with both a password and a OTP code is still secure, but in short it does not defeat the purpose. Your vault's are protected and in the situation where someone gets access to your vault it's most likely to be full access to your computer at which point they have other viable methods to get access to a specific servic…

Isn't the whole point of 2fa that if someone gets access to my computer they can't do shit because they'd need my phone too?
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