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A receipt printer cured my procrastination

laurieherault.com

71–80 of 634 posts

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#71
> 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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#72

I feel like you could increase the visceral satisfaction of task completion by getting one of those old desk spikes to spear each task receipt onto when you’re done with it.

Yes, I thought about it, but I was afraid I might hurt myself stupidly one day :p

They are terrifying.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#73
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.

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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 switch virtual desktops.

Physical objects don't disappear.

I switch tabs.

Physical objects don't disappear.

The power goes out.

Physical objects don't disappear.

Hard to understand in 2025, isn't it?

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#76
post #57

Does anybody else feel like he has invented pomodoros and todo.txt

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 :)

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#77

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.

The thing with the different columns of tasks broken down into subtasks could be replicated in any columnar filesystem view that opens the contents of a folder into a new column when you click on it, meaning every folder is a to-do!

Re: A receipt printer cured my procrastination

#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 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.

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