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.

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.

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

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.

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 did notice that on mobile the left edge of text on your website is cut off by about half a character.

Also I liked how reading the article was its own game loop with progress bar, level up notifications and items! I hope you use that on future posts!

Offtopic but rewarding your article on Firefox on Android, there's a slight misalignment on the side. The left side gets cut off about 5-8 pixels, I'd say. It cuts off most of the first letter on every line.

It might be just my phone, of course. But I don't have any particular extensions installed or anything else.

  > Test the concept in this interactive demo:

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)

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).

I notice a bit of a link in behaviors between people I know who have ADHD and/or OCD. I'm not really sure what someone who "gives-in" to OCD impulses would feel as side effects, etc.. But I'm kind of curious if you see a downside to having followed loops for their reinforcing effects over days of work, etc?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/receipt-paper-harmful/

Liked you included one of many studies from M Csikszentmihalyi

Sadly, I've tried the task breakdown stuff before and it hasn't helped. It's not even just the fact that I procrastinate doing it, but that even when I manage to do it, it makes no difference.

Anything that requires more than a one off "session" of intellectual work is doomed. Even if I do manage to do some good work for a period of time, I'll undo it later, I cannot stop myself from throwing everything in the bin. If I force myself not to throw it in the bin, my brain refuses to function.

ADHD medication also does nothing to help me. It makes me feel anxious for a bit, gives me a pile of side effects, and that's about it. I've tried increasing the dose and all it did was make the side effects worse (including extremely smelly sweat, for whatever reason).

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Helped a little while I was doing it, then I reverted back to normal.

I've even tried the whole accountability thing, but nope. Even if I'm on a call with someone who (like me) commits to do a task, and actually does it, while I committed to do mine, my brain will just tune out and at best I'll be able to do something on autopilot (works for loading up the dishwasher, but not much else).

On the days I manage to burn my willpower to fight it, it drains my energy like Windows 11 does battery on a portable gaming handheld.

Perhaps one day I'll find my own solution and become a multi-millionaire selling a book on it.

My experiences with ADHD align pretty closely with yours. We're of a similar age, but I was only diagnosed recently, and I'm still settling into this, adjusting medication and so on. But just knowing now what's wrong with me, is a game changer. It means I can work with it or around it, instead of being in a state of frustration and despair that I can't function like everyone around me.

In my experience, if I find a task interesting and intellectually stimulating, I can grind away at it for hours and lose track of time. But if it's boring and tedious, it's nearly impossible for me to make any progress at all, unless the consequences for not completing it are severe.

Breaking down tasks is a good idea, and it's something I've thought of myself. Just vacuum the stairs. Just press New Document in LibreOffice and write ONE sentence. Just wipe down the bathroom mirror. I'm not sure I'm ready for a solution as elaborate as yours, though I find the technical aspect of it fascinating, and I might explore it just for that reason.

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.

They are used in kitchens where thermal paper obviously won't work. Other advantages are they can usually print two colours: black and red. And the sound is rather satisfying :-)

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.

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

If so, don't change anything.

Otherwise, if the lack of doing anything productive is bothering you, search for work that

1. seems meaningful to you, 2. has enjoyable aspects to it (no job will be fun all the time), 3. renumerates you sufficiently to meet your current standard of living or at least a standard of living you can accept.

THEN you will have the sufficient motivation to be productive where looking for a system that helps you be productive could be useful.

Alternatively, there's always entrepreneurship, depending on your appetite for risk and stress.

Since I’m in Europe, we don’t really have paper with bisphenol anymore, but that’s not the case everywhere.

But I agree with everything you said, especially the part about how we need to be minimalist when it comes to task management.

Accumulate enough of those and you start finding yourself writing more notes than you are crumpling them and can get demoralized pretty quickly every time you look at the board.

Your tasks must be too granular, if writing it down is a noticeable part of the effort you expend in a day.

Maybe use somewhat larger tasks so you don't notice the overhead of writing it down so much?

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.

The trap is usually "I've figured it out and this new system will solve my life" only to be burned out days or weeks later because this only addresses the symptoms and not that cause.

Cultivating a more friendly environment has been a great help for me. That and taking notes.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

it is easy to make todo items. The hard part is realzing you can't do everything and you must not do something

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.

Yes if you are worried about microplastics. Dr. Rhonda Patrick has an episode where she talks about receipts specifically (at the 1hr 2m mark) [0].

To paraphrase: thermal paper receipts are loaded with BPA which gets absorbed through your skin. The chemicals are worse too since the plastics for receipts aren't scrutinized like they would be for a food storage item. They use BPA is used as a color developer in thermal printing.

It gets way worse if you've used hand sanitizer, lotion, or sunscreen recently since those increase skin permeability. Studies show dramatically higher absorption rates when your skin barrier is compromised. Although I can't find a link for that right now.

Definitely something to think about if you're a cashier or work somewhere handling receipts all day. I've started just declining receipts unless I actually need them for returns/expense reports.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTzw_grLzjw

This may be controversial, but I believe a part of the prevalence of ADHD in younger people is that their set point is unnaturally high from childhood as they never learned how to be bored.

This is my mental model as I personally have observed my set point change throughout my life. I think it makes sense logically as well as these small dopamine hits can become addictive like anything else, just to a lesser extent than something like heroin.

One may argue that if society were simpler or different than today, many of such cases would not be a problem as it is nowadays, kinda like people wearing glasses: you dont ask if they cant see or if they need help, because they have the proper tools (glasses) and environment (our own perception) that fully accomodate them when needed.

This could also apply to other things, but I am mind-wandering. Maybe somebody could draw more links to stuff like this.

As for the paper, you need to choose one that is bisphenol-free, otherwise it is obviously problematic.

I think there's a huge connection to physically writing it as opposed to typing and printing. I never did anything with the weight lifting logs, I thought I might, but the most I ever did with anything in the past was looking at the progression from the last few days or weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NudLfyl2cXc

I picked it up from Tim Ferriss, "The goal is visual tidiness, not Four Seasons."

IME most printers struggle with printing thicker cardstock, or non-normal sizes, e.g. trouble with keeping that size paper straight or with bending/feeding.

Is it just a normal-sized printer, or are there special index-card printers?

There's a power in simply accepting that it's just a feeling, whether you're tired, motivated, hungry... The feeling that you want instead, is a sort of disassociation. The stronger the feeling, the harder it will be. And then you just do the thing you need to do despite lacking motivation or being tired or whatever.

There's something liberating about it that is a bit difficult to put into words. Like "fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway". Sounds a bit stupid, but it's not entirely wrong.

However it's not a magic trick, but rather a kind of thought muscle you can try to train so to speak. It works for me increasingly, despite being quite terrible at this kind of thing. Or rather two muscles: One is creating a distance/objectivity to your feeling or state of mind, the other is to start the action. Sometimes the second part is almost automatic once you do the first part well from my experience.

I even gave an example in my article about this for initial cleaning, specifically with emails. We usually wait for a day when we feel motivated to sort everything out, but that day never comes, and we end up never doing the task. The idea is to have one micro-task every day, like processing a maximum of five emails. Or even five separate tasks of one email each. And on a day when you really have no motivation, you just push yourself to handle one overdue email.

- get up with alarm - make the bed - shave - take vitamins - read 5 pages

Checking off 10 small tasks right in the morning sets me for a productive mood.