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.
It's a very interesting solution. I've been thinking more about filling my online time sheet system in advance but I suspect its too impractical to stick to times or keep readjusting with interruptions, so maybe I will try post-its.
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?
Yes, the system needs to have as little friction as possible, otherwise it becomes very difficult to maintain. That’s why the ticket printer is interesting.
I don’t really suffer from OCD so it’s hard to say, but it’s a very interesting question. I hope someone will be able to answer it someday.
I loved it. I think it perfectly captures the itch that causes procrastination: you had a working solution but it was not good enough for you. You've perfected it but you still have issues with it. You still managed to live with the imperfect version while working on improving it, though. I think that's the part most of us procrastinators fail.
I'm glad you found a method that works for you, and as a fellow small-time blog author I can say I quite enjoyed reading your post.
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.
I totally understand! Just for this article, I restarted it 12 times!
What really made a difference for me was starting very very very very very small, with almost no ambition. That is truly the most important point in my article, but I am not sure if I managed to communicate it clearly.
The idea is really to say something like: my goal is to write for 5 minutes, and if that is too hard, I do 2 minutes. And if I manage that, I consider the task done and I can pick another one, also 5 minutes long.
This gives me a real sense of accomplishment and helps me focus on what I have already done instead of everything that is left to do.
Yup, I'm familiar, I've tried it, but my brain is somehow unable to treat the small accomplished tasks as separate from the larger task.
It still costs me the same "percentage of willpower", if you will, as I would have spent tackling it as the first step of the larger task. And once the willpower runs out, it's out.
With video games it's not that different. What keeps me playing aren't the small rewards. If small rewards were enough to keep me going I'd play pacman all the time. The only thing that keeps me going is curiosity.
Yep. Right now I'm trying to start an instructional video series. I know that I need to break it down into tasks and sub-tasks, and I've done that. So I could go pick a sub-task off the list, like "design a thumbnail image," and just work on that. But as soon as I think of doing that, the entire project looms over me, and I freeze up thinking about the whole thing, including even thoughts like "What do I do in 6 months if I'm out of ideas and I have paying subscribers expecting new content?"
I don't know how to zoom in mentally on a tiny, manageable task and block out the rest. I'm usually unable to start on any part of a project until I can comfortably hold the whole project in my mind.
Nothing helps me procrastinate like trying out a new trick, a new tool, a new list-making method, etc. I've killed time on dozens of different solutions, and some of them were pretty good at getting me to focus and work hard on implementing that new method, but none translated much into getting more actual work done earlier.
Nothing really helped with that until one day I realized I was getting too old to keep being broke because I wouldn't finish work until I absolutely had to, so I got a job where other people give me stuff to do and expect it within a reasonable time frame. I still procrastinate more than I should, but there's too much to do for me to do nothing, so I'm always getting through something, and maybe that will become a habit.
But I hope tools and methods like this help others. It seems like every new method is a great fit for someone out there.
My first comments may have sounded pessimistic, but I do think you've found a couple interesting ideas that I haven't seen before, in making individual notes for your daily habits and throwing the crumpled notes in a jar. I have a couple pads of sticky notes in front of me right now, to get started on items for tomorrow, so thanks for the inspiration.
I've tried sticky notes before, but tended to use those just for the bigger tasks, while thinking I should put my regular daily habits on a single sheet that I could check off, to keep the sticky notes from becoming an unruly mess. But then the daily list always got neglected. I still got the dishes done, but I wouldn't get it checked off, so the overall system fell apart. Putting every task in the same single-note format may feel like overkill, but may be what it takes to work.
It's a great and well written article. I read all of it, and as a fellow ADHD sufferer, that's rare. :)
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.
I totally relate to the way you described it! You can try my solution in a really simple way using post-it notes. Just do a few tests and see if it works for you!
I will probably release the software as source-closed, but if you need help making a custom script, feel free to email me (you can find the address in the footer of my website).
What phone model do you have? I suspect the screen is on the narrow side.
Yes, I am even going to make a real little game to show that you can get absorbed by a very simple game if it uses the gameplay loop and multiple feedback mechanisms correctly.
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.
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!
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.
> serial procrastinators ride a particular high when they change their methods, especially if they spend money... It never lasts long, we return to baseline quite fast
That's probably why the author has beginner tasks on the whiteboard like making a bed, washing the dishes, etc. It's hard to imagine having such tasks throughout one's entire life while struggling with procrastination.
Yes, that is exactly why this method works. Because breaking tasks down into micro-tasks really does work. And the ticket printer helps remove as much friction as possible.
That is what makes it a method that requires very little time and energy, and therefore something that can be sustained over the long term.
That matches my experience. “Write the report” will sit in my inbox forever. “Add 10 items to the outline for the report” will usually break the inertia and end up with me finishing the whole thing.
Then if "Add 10 items" seems to be sitting around for a while, I change it to "Add 5 items".
The part where I end up finishing the whole thing doesn't always happen, but breaking it down into chunks that I can power my way through even if I'm in the worst mood with the worst working conditions at least lets me accomplish a small thing and get a better sense of the task for the next time I try. Sometimes "Add 5 Items" actually turns into "Add 2 items and realize you only need 7 total items."
Some of my procrastination is "I haven't started the task because I can't completely visualize it, I can't completely visualize it because I haven't started the task."
That's exactly how it is for me. If I can visualize the whole task from start to finish, it's generally easy to go ahead and knock it out. If there's a part I'm unsure of, I can put it off forever. That's also true if one of the steps is "call so-and-so and ask about such-and-such," if I don't know what the answer is going to be. That uncertainty blocks the whole project in my mind.
Starting to write this comment was easy, because I knew what I was going to say before I started typing; but writing a book seems impossible, because I can't hold the whole thing in my mind at once. Funny thing is, this comment has changed and expanded since I started it, but since I didn't expect that, there was no uncertainty and I didn't hesitate to start it. Now if I could just find a way to fool myself about bigger projects.
You are absolutely right, and I have actually tried lots of different things and abandoned just as many methods after only a few days. But what pushed me to write this article is that this time, it was different. After several months, this method is still holding up.
4-8 weeks is about the range that a new task system works for me. Probably not coincidentally I had As in most of my classes around the midterms, but graduated with a C average (a semester was 17 weeks at my university).
If you’re procrastinating, but then find a method that works and go on to use it for several years, you didn’t have a procrastination issue, you just didn’t know how to get started.
Chronic procrastinators will inevitably procrastinate no matter what method they find.
Yes, that's true, but chronic procrastinators also get older which means they know what works best for them, and also accept that some stuff might fall through the cracks, and that's perfectly fine.
Wanting to have a perfectly organised life is unrealistic. We're not machines, but we're bombarded by the message that we can do better at organising our lives, often by those that want to sell us their product.
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 normal whiteboard that I do my best to erase at the end of the day, and migrate longer term stuff to some other location. I like it better than a regimented "always empty" system since reasonable leakage from one day to the next is pretty common for me.
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.
> 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.
This reflects my experience as well. Whether it's getting a special little "Getting Things Done" notebook/app or getting the accessories involved in this post, before long my brain has "helpfully" optimized them back out of my life and I'm back at square one.
This is why I've accepted it about my process. Even if something new only boosts my productivity for a little while, a bump is better than nothing, and I often learn something new about myself in the process. So, instead of beating myself up about going whole hog into something I saw online or heard in a podcast, I just accept it and enjoy the increase in energy and motivation for the time that I'm trying it.
> What's I find more interesting, is methods that have worked for someone for years.
From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed.
The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment.
Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.
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.
fyi I tried on my Android phone with Firefox and I don't see the problem you mention. Perhaps some additional display specs may be useful? My screen is 6.67" with 1080x2400px (20:9, 395ppi).
Trying it again to verify... You're right that it's the width. I get a small-ish horizontal scroll. But the problem is that no matter if I scroll it completely to that side the left still gets cut off.
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.
One comment: You're dopamine hacking. My belief is that eventually the process will stop rewarding you with dopamine, and you'll drop it.
Games eventually stop rewarding you with dopamine, and your brain loses interest in them. Same goes for the jar. ADHD brain needs to keep changing the process, in order to keep the reward novel. What works today won't work in six weeks.
(With me it was tearing the index card in half when I'd finished the task. Very satisfying - for a while)
As a former chef who lived by tasks on paper tickets for several years, I recommend getting a tab grabber and spike, for an extra little dopamine hit. It's very satisfying to pull the receipt from the grabber and spike it
Definitely a tactily-satisfying motion. Those spikes always freaked me out- you're one slip away from a Final Destination "spike through the eyeball" situation.
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
I would avoid massively increasing your exposure to receipts. They have endocrine disrupting chemicals and it's advised to not even handle them from retail stores let alone in higher quantities in your own home.
They are getting cancer. That's the problem, cancer rates overall are higher and we're working through figuring out why so we can stop it. This may be one of the reasons.
The one thing that is often a dead giveaway is how many stimulants seem to have the opposite effect on people with ADHD.
I have ADHD, amfetamines help me relax, caffeine causes me to fall a sleep, some anti-allergy medication can cause me to stay awake for 2 days straight.
I read that in some countries doctors can prescribe mild sleeping pills for babies to help them stay calm during long flights. They always advice to test it before going on the flight, because some babies can actually become hyperactive from that medication. If that happens, there's a good chance the baby has ADHD.
I think it depends on what sort of ADHD it is and what stimulant. I feel somewhat more alert after a coffee, but cocaine does nothing. Amphetamines calm the noise from my mind, but make it more difficult to sleep if they're long-release ones.
It’s diphenhydramine, or Sudafed. Also sometimes sold as Unisom but to be distinguished from the Unisom that is Doxylamine. My 18-mo old had the paradoxical reaction.
- diphenhydramine aka Benedryl is an antihistamine with a common side effect of sleepiness
- doxylamine aka Unisom is also an antihistamine but these days people only really use it as a sleep aid or for nausea
- psuedoephedrine aka Sudafed is a decongestant. Not sold over-the-counter because it can be used to make meth. It's a stimulant and appetite supressant
Finally, there's "Sudafed PE" aka phenylephrine, which is also sold as a decongestant but it (literally) doesn't work
This has been the most difficult part for me. I see people in reddit subs talk about how stimulants changed their lives. They are suddenly alert and productive and happy with the world. I get medication envy. I take adderal and fall asleep. Other stimulants I either get no effect or I get anxiety and zero benefits. It's very frustrating.
I think it still varies a lot between individuals. Caffeine often makes me more anxious, the effect on mental energy levels seems kind of random (either short burst of energy or just more tired mentally). Yet when I tried methylphenidate it made my mind calmer, clearly reduced anxiety and helped focus while increasing energy. At the same time it gave me pretty bad insomnia, stomach issues etc.
The best I can describe it is that I felt calmer in my mind, but overstimulated in my physical nervous system.
- 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).
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)
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.
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!
What a great color scheme! Changing colors over the course of the article makes it all a bit more fun and quirky and stand out against common templates.
I use one Intermec with android , I just print todo and lists for my pocket filofax - alas not possible to print under linux (proprietary drivers), and I even had to 'hack' the android intemec print-app (as it was designed for intermec android devices and if you don't use a such it put a watermark line) - TBH even their setup app is windoze only.. FFS
I liked your article, but I loved the design of your blog. Very clever use of colours and structuring, and the interactive demo is the icing on the cake. Nice one!
Hi, thanks for the nice idea and writeup. Just a newsletter tech tip from my experience - be careful with the subscription form. There are bots looking for email fields on websites and filling them with emails from credential leaks or bad-quality emails and spam traps. You may easily end up with a mixed subscription list which will be unusable / resulting in lots of spam reports, your domain reputation might get hurt. To solve, use a captcha or an invisible "honey-pot" subscription form before the real one, use services for checking emails, etc.
Thanks for taking the time to read and give me feedback!
I wrote 12 different versions to try to be shorter, but I was losing way too much information that I thought was important to understand why this method works.
I would note there are some known health hazards in handling thermal-paper receipts(BPA/BPS)[1] with your bare hands if you do so often. I don't know much beyond this, I would look into it.
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.
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 also use dot matrix / impact receipt printers, they work in the same way, just with an ink reel. So no special paper needed.
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 :-)
Right, epiphenols. And despite some BPA-free options there are many alerts about the risks of the replacements.
Maybe is time for a cool old style matrix receipt printer using regular paper?
I'm going to try and see if this works better for me. The daily printout of "things that need to happen today" is a fun idea, especially if I could keep it by my bed and have it print off when my alarm goes off.
Are there any receipt-style printers that can directly print some kind of sticky note? I feel like that would be even more useful since you don't have to keep pins around, though I can see the running cost getting a lot higher
Oh yeah, I don’t think you’ll be able to remove them. If you’re referring to the photo I included in the article, it’s actually just not a good idea. I only stuck the tickets on a vertical surface to get a good photo.
It must exist. I noticed at McDonalds (in Denmark), that each item on the tray has a printed label attached that peels off easily, almost like a sticky note.
Great first article, and very interesting to see someone else using a receipt printer for bite-sized task management!
I have a variety of automations running which print actionable tasks to my receipt printer via a Raspberry Pi. It’s nice having a real-life ticket I can take hold of.
One thing to be aware of if you’re handling receipts frequently: make sure to buy phenol-free thermal paper. Phenol is toxic and some types of it are banned in certain countries.
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.
The developers in the paper only require a small flash of local heat to turn black, which is why thermal printers can print so fast given the time it takes to heat up and cool down the print head. Friction produces enough heat to do that. You can test this by pressing an object down only, or running it very slowly across the surface in comparison.
Yes, you look at it carefully and if it looks like thermal paper it may be toxic.
If the substances used are known to be toxic is another matter but you won't know that even with a correct label because it takes time for us to find out that new substances are toxic.
I think this is the right approach, speaking as someone who went down the rabbit-hole of looking at alternative non-bisphenol or non-phenol image developers. The very little research on the new ones tend to conclude "we don't know if it's toxic in the long term" or in the case of urea-based papers, "it's highly toxic against aquatic life."
To the GP, if the goal is to avoid phenol papers, phenol papers tend to develop deeper black. And in the US, phenol-free papers are new enough the backside often advertises it. Some are very misleadingly labeled BPA-free, which usually means it's made with the very similar and likely equally toxic BPS.
Seriously though, I'm going to try your idea with the receipt printer (I didn't need an excuse to buy it, no-no, that's not it, haha) and I'll see if it can help me. Sadly, even games cannot interest me for long enough; the longest I could play a game, recently, is a week, then I abandon it.
I like it! For me, I can confirm that the smaller the task, the less likely it is for me to procrastinate on it.
I also didn't know that receipt printers don't need ink, that's cool.
On a similar note: me and my partner recently also started using an app that divides up the household chores into small tasks and schedules them for us (e.g. "today you have to vacuum the living room"). For us, this prevents conflicts and also frees the mind of having to keep track of those things.
There is also one that is called "tody" that we didn't try out.
Both require a small subscription fee though, which I really dislike. I wish I had found a nice open source alternative. Besides the subscription fee (which was like 18€/year for us both), I have no complaints yet about the app.
This is immediately one of my favourite articles of all-time. It's well-written, visually appealing, and the subject matter is absolutely down my alley. I might actually just buy one and try this out.
I absolutely love how you show and tell, by having an article with an EXP system. But when do I get skill unlocks? I'm really hoping to be able to enjoy your next article with upgrades.
Thank you for your comment, it really means a lot to me! I put so much time (and heart) into making it that a comment like yours is the best reward I could ask for.
Haha, I’m planning to make a real mini-game for an upcoming article!
It's increasingly strange how psychologically different something is when it's physically in front of you vs a representation of that exact same thing on a particular sort of display, especially given apparently some representations of activities on the display are addictive, while others become repulsive. As I mentioned yesterday I'm hearing more from people that attempt to avoid screens as much as possible, and this seems like yet another manifestation of that tendency.
If our UIs were more skeumorphic would that help with all this and remove the need for the physical printer?
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.
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).
Mac Stickies absolutely can be set to float above everything else, and survive power outages (battery permitting) and reboots. It is true they are tied to the Space they are in though.
They also have the advantages associated with not being physical of course.
I see it like when you compare digital books vs physical books: physical requires less context in your mind, and it provides direct rather than abstract stimulus to the brain.
When you go digital, your brain is writing the sticky note, but also has in its cache the instructions for the menu, the apps you normally use, that annoying notification, etc, plus your rl context. But on physical, you only have loaded the instructions for the pen and paper (and your rl context).
Having too many things in mind can reduce your executive function battery. Hope this helps! (ofc, this is an oversimplification of ADHD)
Correct. Computers are the realm of procrastination because there are so many ways work can hide and so many forms it can morph into. If you need to work from paper, there's not much you can do other than move through it. It may get disorganized, but it is still there. There is no question that modern workers have exponentially more reason to procrastinate than workers from 50 years ago.
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.
Having not thought about it at this level, the feedback loop explains why my Bullet Journal works well for me. I can write down any task and break it down to any level of detail without worrying about software, which is nice, and I get a nice little reward when I cross off a bullet. I have used post-its in this way in the past and found that it's more effective than the bullet journal if I need a real kick in the pants. Also I move around a lot between home, office, and work trips. While post-its don't travel well, the phone apps just don't work for me.
When I need to coax my kids (7 and 10) into completing a tedious list of chores, like cleaning their room and playroom, practicing their instruments, and doing their homework, I also reach for the post-its. They each get their own color and we talk through the best way to break things down, arrange them in a backlog on the wall, set a timer, and agree to meet when the timer goes off to review our progress.
I also had good results with bullet journaling, but I had consistency issues. The advantage of the ticket printer is that it is much quicker to print. But I also have the advantage of working from home, so I do not need two separate systems.
This idea really resonates. Like others have mentioned, there's a unique power to a physical artifact that a digital to-do list just can't replicate.
I went down this exact rabbit hole a while back, trying to bridge the gap between my digital planning and physical, actionable "tickets." The setup part can be a bit of a pain, especially getting a printer reliably online and talking to it from different apps and services.
This is the exact problem I built Printercow¹ to solve (author here!). It's a small service that lets you turn any thermal printer into a networked API endpoint with a one-line install command on a Raspberry Pi. The idea is to handle all the backend plumbing so you can focus on the fun part—triggering prints from Zapier, a script, or your own app to create a system just like the author's.
Happy to answer any questions about the setup!
This looks great! But it says it’s FOSS and that I can host it myself, but the link to GitHub in the docs doesn’t show any repos. Is it somewhere else?
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 :)
Hi Laurie, reading your article, I'm wondering to myself, maybe I should copy this, and add a Duolingo aspect to it, the first feature I can think of is a button (near the printer, or a virtual one on the app) that is basically "Give me a random task". Duolingo also has lessons (where the learner has to complete several questions), and maybe a "lesson" can be a big task, that encompasses its subtasks.
I accidentally found an effective speedup tracking tasks to be done. Normally we make Github issues and Pull-requests to fix them with long descriptions in both.
Instead made a single issue with a table and each row having an emoji, item title, and when complete link to the fix. As new items were identified I added a row with emoji for 'not started'. Had emoji's were 'under construction', 'already done above', 'not needed', etc. This snowballed with me completing one item per day over 30 days until it was all done. I'm called it EDD Emoji-Driven-Development.
In Sleek (todo.txt for linux) I can have multiple txt with multiple context inside.
On the other hand, I don't think pomodoros are strictly 25 minute sessions. I can setup any structure in my pomodoro app of choice Solanum and chain sessions.
> Modern games provide much stronger feedback. Now, when you hit an enemy, you might see:
> the crosshair briefly changes to confirm the hit, damage numbers pop up above the enemy, sound effects, enemy death animations, a progress bar filling up, a new skill unlocked, random reward and more...
I wonder if we can gamify todo apps in the same way, most are too boring and too corporate. It should implement all gaming bells and whistles for ensuring you complete your tasks.
It is coming along more and more. But I think the core is being able to handle a lot more tasks, and therefore being able to easily break them down into smaller ones. That is really the heart of the game loop.
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.
I can practically guarantee you this'll never happen. They look really scary but never in my life have I heard of an injury on one of those things, and people tend to make all sorts of fantastical injuries in the restaurant industry. It just doesn't happen.
> 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 to the work to get it to hit harder: Working by others (social/peer), snacks (biological rewards), free caffeine, money (sometimes lots), etc. And physical trinkets.
We have studied this to death in other parts of our own biology, like food. Unhealthy food/drink is fun. It's a pleasurable reward sometimes, but if it forms the basis for your diet you are going to have a lot of trouble enjoying healthy stuff. You can't outrun a bad diet. You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down. You have to treat the underlying problem: A hugely stimulating / rewarding thing is displacing the healthy stuff. Almost every piece of sane health advice after 1900 has focused on removing unhealthy factors first.
Work/hobby is no different. When I'm obsessed with factorio (it happened a lot once or twice), I find it harder to focus on work. When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.
I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
This is the point I think many people fail to understand about consumption. Yes, it is usually perfectly sustainable to spend most of your free time scrolling tiktok or playing high-reward video games, yes you can live without regular exercise or a strict diet, but there are hard to quantify effects on an entire range of other things in your life. I think it is very important for the modern person to pay close attention to their mental state with and without the things they turn to the most, especially if experiencing problems with focus or motivation.
> 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 see other notifications, check and app quickly, or more generally, break flow as we have to switch to another device and back again.
I carried 2 phones for many years. It was more trouble than it’s worth. Especially these days. Working from home, my only work use of the phone is for the Authenticator app.
You should try a CLI-based workflow for 2FA. As long as you can exfiltrate the secret (and you often can by pretending you can't scan QR codes), then you can use oathtool to generate passcodes.
1. use 'pass' to save the secret: 'pass edit work.secret' <enter it and quit>
2. use oathtool to generate 2fa given a secret:
'
#!/bin/bash
oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" >&1
'
use it like '2fa work'
If you have 'xsel' you can even do
'oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" | xsel -ib'
Even if you only have the QR code, you can download the image or screenshot it and then extract the secret without ever having to use a smartphone by using zbarimg and then manually extracting the secret from the URI:
If you have some 2FA that you need to enter 10 times per day, then you can also add a global shortcut to automatically paste it. Of course, this undermines the "second device" security. Some PC password managers also support 2FA, e.g. https://github.com/paolostivanin/OTPClient ( sudo apt install otpclient )
Works great if you have xfce4-screenshooter, gxmessage, and zbarimg installed. It allows you to draw a box around a screen region, screenshots it, decodes it via zbarimg, and pipes the output into a dialog box with copyable text.
Heh, I use pass like this; but it's on my (Pine)Phone, so it doesn't solve the parent's original problem ;-)
Although the nice thing about CLI workflows is that I can easily run it by SSHing into my phone (just make sure you set up GPG so the passphrase prompt will appear in your terminal, and not as a popup on the phone!)
My company also uses MS auth + 2fa for everything. Even signing into corporate G-suite :-). But I do not like the Microsoft Authenticator - I previously had issues where it would not show the number - and I was able to switch to a different TOTP provider. It’s a bit buried in the menus but possible
Hmm. I wonder if there would be a market for a super simple TOTP authentication device with an e-paper display. Kind of like those RSA tokens with the LCDs, but more modern and able to hold any number of TOTP credentials.
Getting the credentials loaded could be a bit of a pain without a camera for QR code scanning. Easiest solution would be via Bluetooth to a companion app, which you would probably want anyway for periodic time sync (likely wouldn't be worth it to embed a GNSS receiver just to update the time).
Probably be a pretty small market, but as a niche Kickstarter device? I could see a small but loyal customer base.
they exist, in my country they are available as alternative to smartphone apps for identity auth. (ie you can choose between android, iphone, and TOTP LCD device.)
I would love this, but only if it also successfully implemented a few disparate authentication protocols that essentially do the same things (prove identity) but are regrettably proprietary - like the de facto standard electronic ID in Sweden, BankID.
Sounds like a job for a second phone, one which you'd just be extra careful to only use for one purpose. It can be cheap as balls, but it will have a QR-compatible camera and whatever else we may have come to expect from such a device. :)
Yubikey does TOTP on-board, but you need to connect it to a phone or computer (no display or on-board power). It solves a different problem, where you want to have your TOTP credentials on a tamper resistant hardware security module. It doesn't solve the "don't want to carry around a phone for TOTP" problem.
This doesnt make sense. If you need a 2FA code then you are obviously using some device like a laptop already. Yubikey totally solves the "need a second personal device" problem.
Make sure your GNSS receiver supports OSNMA, and be _extremely_ trusting of your battery-backed RTC and profoundly skeptical of time jumps over a certain magnitude.
GNSS spoofing is trivial now and it's an extremely useful way to manipulate a target device's idea of time, which breaks all sorts of things. (SSL certificate validity periods...)
First of all, I'm not a fan of constantly needing to re-authenticate.
But for your specific problem there is a simple solution that isn't particularly expensive. Buy a new phone. Install 2FA on it, and don't install anything else.
I use MS Authenticator for work too. It doesn't do standard TOTP, at least not for Entra. The QR codes don't contain the secret. IDK that anyone has been able to exfiltrate a secret and generate codes with a third party app.
I personally use an Android emulator on my laptop, which achieves the same goal. It saves and restores state automatically for quick startup.
1Password can be your 2fa and autofill those fields. It has a built in scanner which will look at your screen and read the QR code on the screen (no separate device needed).
Two Factor doesn't mean 2 devices.
Two factor generally has been thought of as "something you know, and something you have."
Let's do a quick threat model on putting both passwords and MFA tokens in a 1password vault.
1Password employees a recovery key + password login by default, and logging into a vault requires you to either have a device with the encrypted vault on it and your password, or have knowledge of your password and knowledge of your recovery key (normally in a file which makes it something you have) essentially traditional 2fa needed to log into a new device.
If someone steals your phone with 1password installed - they need your 1password to be able to access your credentials on the physical device. At that point they already have both your factors - your phone (have) and your password (know) - still protected by 2fa.
If someone manages to fully root your computer, they could wait until you unlock your vault and then extract your credentials. However, if you use traditional 2fa on a separate device - then they can just wait until you log into the target app, and then ride your session and get the same level of access to the target. While there may be a small difference in level of effort or how long it takes, the same access level is possible, and the requirements are that they have very privileged access to your operating system. Someone rooting the device that you login to services is grants them "single factor" access to your services when you access them.
There is some subtle differences between these, but except for situations where you have very high privileged requirements, at which point you should be using yubikeys or standalone MFA devices, using 1Password with OTP and password is very comparable to using a separate device for MFA.
I'm a previous red teamer and currently a blue teamer.
I imagine you've considered it already, but maybe your work would be willing to put the 2FA secret into something like 1Password, which you could access on your computer instead of your phone.
Defeats the purpose of 2FA though. I'd argue a cheap 2FA-only phone would be good, if they're struggling to touch their real phone without being consumed by distractions.
No the two factors are something you have and something you know. Not something you have and another thing you have. In this case decrypting the vault requires two factors.
In my view the factors are attach vectors. If i wrote both my token and my pass down on a single sticky note, it's 1FA. If i have them on two stickies stored in two locations, it's 2FA.
Though i have no idea, that's just how i internalized it over the years. In your 1Pass example, it's a single attack vector (the password of my 1pass) to compromising both the token and the password of the product/server/thing.
In the spirit of the idea, it would be the attack vector imo. So behind locked doors, buildings, safes, etc.
Eg a hacker can access my computer, even have a clipboard/keylogger on my machine, and have a difficult finding my token if it's on my phone. They need to attack my phone and my computer.
Having them both in your unlocked 1Password vault means if someone walks by your computer they can access your account. A single location with both of your "2FA". If they had a keylogger installed on your machine, they only need your single 1Pass password to breach your "2FA".
Granted i imagine that a Phone TOTP would still be a concern with a keylogger on your PC, since you still enter it on your compromised machine. Still more difficult than the having the totp key though, of course.
You're inventing a new definition of the term 2FA. The problem it was created to solve was the ability of attackers to remotely access services using weak or compromised user passwords. This is relatively low cost to do on a mass scale whereas rooting each individual's computer to compromise their password manager is not.
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?
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 service you use.
Thanks for sharing a potentially useful tool but I will not use it without a lot more details about how this browser extension secures the 2FA secrets from sketchy websites/ads.
Most trusted desktop password manager apps can manage and autofill OTPs in browsers as well, e.g. KeepassXC and 1password. (If you're making the tradeoff anyway, I think you may as well use a password manager you already trust with other secrets.)
If it's Authenticator you can use bitwarden from your browser, that's what I do. If you're using a custom app or something different then yeah it's annoying
In my union contract we have language that requires the employer to provide us with a hardware 2FA token for just this reason. I and some of my coworkers don't use smartphones, and we didn't want to be obligated to use one for work.
"So long as [employer's] access management vendor... supports the use of physical two-factor authentication devices (for example, a YubiKey), [employer] shall make such devices available to Employees upon their submission of a request for the device."
I've worked in places that wanted to push cell phone apps on the team for auth and we also pushed for hardware tokens. It worked extremely well. The concerns we had were mainly centered on privacy since the app wanted location/camera access and apps can (or at least at the time could) get a ton of data from your device without requesting any permission at all like getting a list of every app you have installed, or data from sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, thermometer, etc.
Even doing nothing beyond the authentication, it is still requiring task switching, changes devices, waiting for codes, entering them, switching back. It’s very disruptive to any type of flow state.
I see some evidence that yubikeys are used somewhere in the organization, but not sure where or how.
The only information we were sent to get this all setup was specifically for a phone. The portal that exists to add devices only appears to support phones.
I have a co-worker who simply tried to use Authy instead of MS Authenticator and it didn’t work. There is a lot of bureaucracy that typically makes it not worth the fight.
Ever since I disabled all the notifications on my phone my life has been happier. It won't work for everyone (50% of the time it doesn't even work for me), but I can't help but write this anecdote here.
I'm old enough to have lived through the era of standalone authenticators. The downsides of that approach are also numerous.
I understand where you're coming from though, and I think this is where OS features like Focus Modes come into play.
When I'm in a "Work" mode, I literally don't see notifications from most of my apps. They don't show up in the notification center, or on app icon badges, or anywhere.
This takes a few minutes to set up, but once it's in place, it's fantastic. I also do this for other aspects of my life: Photography, Research, etc. When I'm in those modes, I don't want to see anything except for the apps that are specific to what I'm doing. It's worth the effort of setting this up IMO, and extends far beyond just work.
Have you tried a smart watch? The Duo 2FA app lets you add an arbitrary TFA code based authenticator with same QR code Google Authenticator supports and generate those from their Apple WatchOS [0] or Android WearOS apps. I have used it successfully for years, it's a huge reason I got an Apple Watch in fact. Now you'll have to configure your watch with a "work" focus mode that turns off all notifications and not install any fancy apps on the watch (do those still exist?), but it can free you from your phone.
Along the same lines the Meta Wayfarer[2] smart glasses lets you take slice of life photos and videos without needing to whip out your phone. You lose a ton of quality but stay in the moment more. The AI features are getting better so eventually you'll be able to use it for basic information lookup.
I often trick myself imagining life is a game that throws boring or difficult tasks (boredom often equals difficult ) at me that I need to survive. It often helps because I I can picture finishing these things as rewards that help me get to the next "level". It was particularly helpful getting beyond difficult times (many bad events coinciding). Not sure if this can be transferred to others, or if it works because of my brain chemistry.
This stops working after a while. The real deal is you begin the realise the 'points' you accumulate playing this game can't be redeemed to do something fun or satisfying. This game begins to appear totally pointless as you age(Points are less useful as you age, and dying with lots of points means time and effort was spent to acquire a thing that can't be spent now). Which causes even more procrastination.
I think humans crave freedom and free time, with good health more than anything else. This frees you up to care about doing things which we feel more rewarding and fun.
Several times you are better off skipping the drills and rituals and just focus on making lots of money as quickly as possible. And of course competing to accumulate more money just for the heck of it is equally demotivating as well. Focus what you want from the money and that is likely to move you along better use of your time and effort.
I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.
I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.
i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.
Pretty sure my commenting pattern is similar. I write a bunch of comments in a short period then none at all and just lurk for a while. All the HN comment data is published, right? (BigQuery?) I wonder if we can find cyclic comment patterns for individual users. It might be harder to find patterns if the user creates a new account every cycle like parent, but maybe just users that have been active for 2+ years.
That’s also occurs with me, but in games! Sometimes, I feel “obligated” to play, the urge of playing that unique game, then suddenly, it disappears.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that occurs often, some things just lose that sparkle with the time, and it’s okay, you just need to find a new way to make your task. This article is a good example of how you can do this, and, with some time, change your methods!
I believe that having urges come and go is the natural way human motivation works. Doing something every day, whether you feel like doing it or not, is the artificial thing that you need to be trained to do.
Some things require larger blocks of time. For example, you need several days in line to take a vacation; you can't simply take "5 minutes of vacation" every day. Some things are done much better if you dedicate an entire day, or at least a few consecutive hours to them: whether it is learning something new, writing a blog article, relaxing, hanging out with your friends, etc.
It would be more natural to work 16 hours a day when you feel like it, and then take a day off.
My approach is to gather HN articles via RSS (then convert to maildir) a couple of times a day. That has two effects:
- It reduces the subconscious slot-machine mechanic (compared to refreshing a Web page) since I know there won't be anything new in my feed for the next several hours.
- There are also tangible benefits to using a proper feed reader, like only seeing unread items. That also discourages "cheating", since reading things outside of my feeds will require me to mark them as "read" after the next update.
I receive comment-replies via email, filtered into an IMAP folder that refreshes a bit faster than the RSS feed, to allow conversations.
These don't have notifications, but if I'm in the mail reader I can see their unread count (usually zero; and hence can be dismissed with a glance)
Yeah. Sometimes the reason you can't focus on something is that some part of your brain is trying to tell you that you shouldn't.
Unfortunately, that part of the brain usually sucks at coming up with an alternative plan, and "do something else, anything" is not very actionable. And you still need to pay your bills somehow.
The natural reward for work is work done. I don't need a motivational system to do the dishes. The motivation is seeing the dirty dishes gradually disappear, and the kitchen become cleaner. I don't need to create pieces of papers to represent that, because it is already happening right there, in real life.
If I work on a project, it helps to specify all things that need to be done (as opposed to working on something open-ended), so that I can see how I am getting closer to the moment of "done". A nice thing about test-driven development is that you produce a set of checkboxes first, and then you gradually check them off. Even if the work is open-ended, if I keep thinking about new features that would be nice add, it helps to specify a "version 1.0", and after achieving it, a "version 2.0", etc. The idea is that after each version I can take a break and feel that my work is done.
The least motivating thing is probably the job, as an employee. You work for 8 hours a day (generously assuming no overtime). There is no way to complete those 8 hours in e.g. 4 hours of working harder and then take a walk. In theory, if you do Scrum, you should have a certain reasonable amount of work assigned per sprint, and if you do it faster, then I guess you can take a short break and do something enjoyable (such as refactoring). In practice, almost no one does Scrum by the book; you will probably be randomly interrupted by extra tasks, and given unrealistic deadlines to avoid the possibility of completing the work earlier.
Another demotivating thing about the job is that there is no personal consequence of completing a project; you immediately start working on a new one. The natural response to completing a work is to congratulate yourself and take a break. But at work, the vacations are mostly unrelated to projects. Also, you are paid per time spent working, not by the number of projects finished. So it is all disconnected.
So I guess it all needs to be a part of some greater project, which can possibly be completed one day. Such as, putting your money in index funds, and planning to retire as soon as you reach a specified amount. Then each day you can congratulate yourself for getting 0.01% closer to the goal. (Or you can save money for other specific things, if that is what you desire.)
Or if you work remotely, lie. Complete your projects and do whatever you want with your newly minted free time. You still need to be available and maybe keep a status indicator green but otherwise you should be free to reclaim 10 - 20 hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Thoughts?
Really, most people's adult lives are just a constant stream of boring/difficult tasks they need to grind in order to get through: School, work, paying bills, managing money, doing taxes, cleaning the house, cooking food, doing dishes, fixing this, maintaining that... If you don't have a way to trick your brain into grinding these things over and over, you're not going to get very far.
And what about those of us that find they have stretches where they don't focus well on anything? Games included. There are several games I'd like to spend a bit of time on. It ain't happening.
I find this intensely amusing. In grade school, I got "mono" and dang near literally slept for several days. Granted, being sick is a bit different than being disinterested.
My problem is typically more that there are plenty of more interesting things to do than anything I'd like to do right now.
When you are feeling this way it's good to take stock of your 3 fundamentals... Food, Sleep, Exercise. If any are suffering, then it's almost guaranteed to be the source of your problem. It sounds elementary but I have to remind myself of this constantly. Particularly the sleep part
I posted in another thread how reliable some old/popular answers can be. Frustratingly so. :D
Exercise is annoying, as without a lot of modern life, it largely takes care of itself. Back when I could just walk to a grocery, as an easy example, it was unsurprisingly easy to stay in decent shape.
Murkier mental health issues? You desire what games used to give, unadulterated innocent fun, but nowadays they don't? You are a bit "stuck in life" (maybe even going through mild depression) and you are not the addictive/escapist type.
>When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.
Man no offense but this sounds devastatingly sad. "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
I agree with both of you, but when I am fasting and also doing activities with a high level of dopamine release, I actually find it easier to focus on my tasks as well.
Yeah, it denies that games are any good, and demonizes fun as a vice. People who talk about dopamine and procrastination are just looking for ways to beat themselves up and start conflicted fights with themselves over what they want.
If not then you're already 'starving' yourself of the purest form of pleasure (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong). I don't think taking one step further is that sad.
That’s insanely stereotypical. There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”.
Instead, there are many thousands of different substances which can elicit, heighten, prolong or enable pleasure; some illegal, some legal, some included in your favourite meals and snacks.
Even vanilla is a ”drug” which enhances pleasurable feelings. (Vanillin and ethylvanillin are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and consuming them will increase serotonergic and dopaminergic activity)
> There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”
Yeah, I mean I think we barely know what that would even be. But some drugs come pretty damn close I'd wager, and I'm not talking about vanilla or ethylvanillin.
I think if you've dabbled in opiates, you've come pretty close to what the purest form of pleasure would feel like.
Most ”normal” people react to opiates/opioids with intense nausea and discomfort.
People unable to feel the full spectrum of pleasure sober have quite a different experience, since these substances completely eradicate any pain, grief, anxiety and stress that commonly prevents pleasurable feelings for occurring.
> There is no ”drugs” that is ”the purest form of pleasure”.
Having had fentanyl for a couple of surgical procedures, I am inclined to disagree. No one should feel that happy after having their colon inflated like a balloon or chunks of metal screwed into their bones.
You are missing the point. Sure there are individual substances that can provide such experiences. However, talking about drugs as some sort of infinite pleasure inducers is intellectual dishonesty: the category is not homogeneous.
I think this is more akin to literally starving yourself so that a single bit of spinach tastes great. It turns out you can in fact eat a candy bar and have pizza and not become obese or otherwise damage your health. It's not one or the other and OP might need some kind of professional help to mediate their moods...
When I was a kid, I'd eat Trix cereal. I enjoyed it. Now - I find it sort of gross. It's too sweet. You can reach that same point with cake or pizza or a candy bar, etc. - in that, those foods become sort of gross. Foods like spinach become more satisfying. Not only that, but that satisfaction may yield a higher reward than you ever could with Trix cereal. But you'd never reach that higher level of satisfaction as long as you're eating Trix cereal every day.
> It turns out you can in fact eat a candy bar and have pizza and not become obese
That is extremely dependent on an individual's metabolism. When I was young I had hyperthyroidism and could not keep enough weight on. I could, and needed to, consume a huge amount of calories without gaining a pound. Now, my thyroid's burnt out, and my sleep is terrible, and it feels like I gain wait from breathing in air.
I wouldn't overthink it, or take it to extremes just to find a strawman. A charitable reading of my comment shows we agree. I talked about indulgences displacing healthier options.
More specifically, when TFA talks about difficulty writing an email vs playing hours of video games, I thought it was worth mentioning that 2 hrs of factorio 3 or 4 nights a week might actually dampen the excitement of work a little by providing a perfectly tailored experience designed to engage the part of your brain that your employer would pay your for.
The analogy isn't about "hunger is the best seasoning" (although isn't that an apt colloquialism !), the analogy is insulin resistance is something like "dopamine resistance" both take consistent large over indulgences or poor decisions (however socially acceptable!) to cause a runaway effect which degrades "health".
Hope that's clearer. It's about establishing healthy habits not starving oneself.
It's quite difficult for some people to allow themselves a candy bar without sliding down a slippery slope. I'm formerly obese, I lost 100 lbs, and I know when I relax my standards even for a few days, it can spiral.
Self-discipline looks different for everyone. I don't think it's necessarily unhealthy.
I suppose in some sense, but how is this sadder than the reality that we're not all doped up on space cocaine?
A desirable (practical) reality would seem to stem not just from first order effects now, but also in summation of all the credits and debits that it leaves us over time.
> "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
Don't worry, that rule only applies to poor people!
.
More seriously, how long does it take to stop the dopamine high? Could we schedule our lives so that we would e.g. spend one month doing the most exciting things ever... followed by three days of meditation... which would make us ready for a few months of hard work... and then do it again?
You know, so that we are still productive at work, but don't have to sacrifice most of the joy in life to achieve that.
> You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down
Sorry for being off-topic, but you actually can (not a scientist, just speaking from experience). My guess is the digestion slows down and the sugar gets released into the system at a slower rate (probably because of the lower overall Glycemic index?). Anyways, it actually works! Just eat your salad before the ice cream to make sure it does :)
I don't even get that kind of hit from a game though unless playing with friends, and that's because I'm with my friends. If I was playing alone I'd play for 30 minutes max and then stop.
> I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
Hard agree, and yes we have our vices, but wouldn't life be better if we had more agency over them?
My phone is overwhelmingly a detriment to my life, it's just disguised as a necessary utility by doing the same things I could do anyway if I didn't have it. It's not never uniquely valuable to me, but those rare signals don't need to be tightly coupled with so so so much noise.
The big one for me lately is the aptly named tethering. It's wild that it's not just built into my mac at this point, if it weren't for that, (maybe 2Fa as well) I'd leave the phone at home so often I'd probably forget about it, and I long for that future.
It's not necessarily true that games being fun is the reason why you can play them for hours.
Think about games where you're grinding doing tedious stuff to level up your character. Not nearly as fun, but still something you can end up doing for hours.
I think I do some of this, but my framing is not explicitly about adopting monastic practices - rather, it's about having a "novelty budget" each day. Every novel stimulus is an opportunity to careen off course.
However, if the task ahead of me is great and I'm motivated, then I automatically seek less novelty to focus on it. IOW, maintaining a boring baseline of routine so that novelty is selective is important as a way of being able to "jump into action". It's good to get off the phone. It doesn't replace the intrinsic motivation.
There's an aspect to productivity advice that is about shouting down your burnout by adding more productivity hacks or taking stimulants or flagellating oneself. Burnout's root cause has to be approached by asking the tougher questions about life and aligning with a philosophy that is truthful to that. The work itself will have moments of routine boredom, exhilaration, and heartbreak, but the motive has to endure all of it.
> 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.
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.
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.
Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.
Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.
Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).
Yes, I was familiar with the concept of INCUP, but I had never seen it summarized so simply.
As for variable interval rewards, I knew about the concept, but I did not include it in the article because it is already too long, and also because I have not yet found a smart way to use it in my productivity system.
I tried creating my own loot box reward system where I earn points for completing tasks (literally spare change), and I can use the money to buy a die roll, with a d20 dictating what prize I got. Prizes would be things like permission to buy Pokémon cards or a full price video game, etc, with a guaranteed "high rarity" prize every X rolls.
Maybe it'd be fun to combine this with your receipts, where random tasks reward points to earn prizes.
In computer systems, this could be added by default as the first subtask when you create a task: "either do the entire thing, or split it into smaller parts".
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 405 ms ] threadI 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?
Yes, the system needs to have as little friction as possible, otherwise it becomes very difficult to maintain. That’s why the ticket printer is interesting.
I don’t really suffer from OCD so it’s hard to say, but it’s a very interesting question. I hope someone will be able to answer it someday.
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.
What really made a difference for me was starting very very very very very small, with almost no ambition. That is truly the most important point in my article, but I am not sure if I managed to communicate it clearly.
The idea is really to say something like: my goal is to write for 5 minutes, and if that is too hard, I do 2 minutes. And if I manage that, I consider the task done and I can pick another one, also 5 minutes long.
This gives me a real sense of accomplishment and helps me focus on what I have already done instead of everything that is left to do.
It still costs me the same "percentage of willpower", if you will, as I would have spent tackling it as the first step of the larger task. And once the willpower runs out, it's out.
With video games it's not that different. What keeps me playing aren't the small rewards. If small rewards were enough to keep me going I'd play pacman all the time. The only thing that keeps me going is curiosity.
I don't know how to zoom in mentally on a tiny, manageable task and block out the rest. I'm usually unable to start on any part of a project until I can comfortably hold the whole project in my mind.
Nothing really helped with that until one day I realized I was getting too old to keep being broke because I wouldn't finish work until I absolutely had to, so I got a job where other people give me stuff to do and expect it within a reasonable time frame. I still procrastinate more than I should, but there's too much to do for me to do nothing, so I'm always getting through something, and maybe that will become a habit.
But I hope tools and methods like this help others. It seems like every new method is a great fit for someone out there.
I've tried sticky notes before, but tended to use those just for the bigger tasks, while thinking I should put my regular daily habits on a single sheet that I could check off, to keep the sticky notes from becoming an unruly mess. But then the daily list always got neglected. I still got the dishes done, but I wouldn't get it checked off, so the overall system fell apart. Putting every task in the same single-note format may feel like overkill, but may be what it takes to work.
I found that the usual ADHD medication (methylphenidate) does not work for me. However, modafinil does. YMMV.
https://gwern.net/Modafinil
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.
I totally relate to the way you described it! You can try my solution in a really simple way using post-it notes. Just do a few tests and see if it works for you!
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!
What phone model do you have? I suspect the screen is on the narrow side.
Yes, I am even going to make a real little game to show that you can get absorbed by a very simple game if it uses the gameplay loop and multiple feedback mechanisms correctly.
Thank you for your comment!
You are right! I will change it!
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.
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.
That's probably why the author has beginner tasks on the whiteboard like making a bed, washing the dishes, etc. It's hard to imagine having such tasks throughout one's entire life while struggling with procrastination.
That is what makes it a method that requires very little time and energy, and therefore something that can be sustained over the long term.
The part where I end up finishing the whole thing doesn't always happen, but breaking it down into chunks that I can power my way through even if I'm in the worst mood with the worst working conditions at least lets me accomplish a small thing and get a better sense of the task for the next time I try. Sometimes "Add 5 Items" actually turns into "Add 2 items and realize you only need 7 total items."
Some of my procrastination is "I haven't started the task because I can't completely visualize it, I can't completely visualize it because I haven't started the task."
Starting to write this comment was easy, because I knew what I was going to say before I started typing; but writing a book seems impossible, because I can't hold the whole thing in my mind at once. Funny thing is, this comment has changed and expanded since I started it, but since I didn't expect that, there was no uncertainty and I didn't hesitate to start it. Now if I could just find a way to fool myself about bigger projects.
You are absolutely right, and I have actually tried lots of different things and abandoned just as many methods after only a few days. But what pushed me to write this article is that this time, it was different. After several months, this method is still holding up.
Chronic procrastinators will inevitably procrastinate no matter what method they find.
Wanting to have a perfectly organised life is unrealistic. We're not machines, but we're bombarded by the message that we can do better at organising our lives, often by those that want to sell us their product.
For day to day stuff I just use a more normal whiteboard that I do my best to erase at the end of the day, and migrate longer term stuff to some other location. I like it better than a regimented "always empty" system since reasonable leakage from one day to the next is pretty common for me.
This reflects my experience as well. Whether it's getting a special little "Getting Things Done" notebook/app or getting the accessories involved in this post, before long my brain has "helpfully" optimized them back out of my life and I'm back at square one.
From 2020 I use a three column worksheet (Libreoffice in Debian): one row per day. One thin column for the date, the second for pending tasks, the third for the "done" ones. Theoretically I just copy-paste between the "pendings" to the "done", but I also add notes as the day progress, so it is also a kind of personal diary. At the end of the day tasks not achieved get moved to some rows below, and new ones are added as needed. The spreadsheet is configured to start automatically on session login, so I can't forget to see my daily assignment. Not perfect, but (mostly) works for me.
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.
Thank you for your comment! It is super helpful.
Admittedly it's not a hi-end phone. I use a Moto G7. Screen is 1080x2270 at 6.2 inches according to [ https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_g7-9357.php#eu ]
Trying it again to verify... You're right that it's the width. I get a small-ish horizontal scroll. But the problem is that no matter if I scroll it completely to that side the left still gets cut off.
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.
I cannot wait for you to try my app :)
Games eventually stop rewarding you with dopamine, and your brain loses interest in them. Same goes for the jar. ADHD brain needs to keep changing the process, in order to keep the reward novel. What works today won't work in six weeks.
(With me it was tearing the index card in half when I'd finished the task. Very satisfying - for a while)
Can we just not? Can we wean ourselves from the "addiction" instead?
You could also put the task on a spike like they do in restaurants with signed receipts.
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
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/receipt-paper-harmful/
I have ADHD, amfetamines help me relax, caffeine causes me to fall a sleep, some anti-allergy medication can cause me to stay awake for 2 days straight.
I read that in some countries doctors can prescribe mild sleeping pills for babies to help them stay calm during long flights. They always advice to test it before going on the flight, because some babies can actually become hyperactive from that medication. If that happens, there's a good chance the baby has ADHD.
- diphenhydramine aka Benedryl is an antihistamine with a common side effect of sleepiness
- doxylamine aka Unisom is also an antihistamine but these days people only really use it as a sleep aid or for nausea
- psuedoephedrine aka Sudafed is a decongestant. Not sold over-the-counter because it can be used to make meth. It's a stimulant and appetite supressant
Finally, there's "Sudafed PE" aka phenylephrine, which is also sold as a decongestant but it (literally) doesn't work
The best I can describe it is that I felt calmer in my mind, but overstimulated in my physical nervous system.
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).
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)
You dont have to do this yourself. A partner or friend could remind you about stuff and literally send you an order.
I’d personally use one of those spikes instead of scrunching up in a ball.
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.
Liked you included one of many studies from M Csikszentmihalyi
(Late reply because I procrastinate reading HN).
One suggestion- mention the printer earlier in the post. It took so long to get around to it that I started wondering if the link was wrong.
I wrote 12 different versions to try to be shorter, but I was losing way too much information that I thought was important to understand why this method works.
I would note there are some known health hazards in handling thermal-paper receipts(BPA/BPS)[1] with your bare hands if you do so often. I don't know much beyond this, I would look into it.
[1] https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
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.
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.
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 :-)
Are there any receipt-style printers that can directly print some kind of sticky note? I feel like that would be even more useful since you don't have to keep pins around, though I can see the running cost getting a lot higher
Personally, with receipt-style tickets, I print them and make a small stack. I usually go through them in the same order.
But I can also use a small clip.
It must exist. I noticed at McDonalds (in Denmark), that each item on the tray has a printed label attached that peels off easily, almost like a sticky note.
Amazon search for ‘restaurant ticket holder’ reveals many options for under $20
I have a variety of automations running which print actionable tasks to my receipt printer via a Raspberry Pi. It’s nice having a real-life ticket I can take hold of.
One thing to be aware of if you’re handling receipts frequently: make sure to buy phenol-free thermal paper. Phenol is toxic and some types of it are banned in certain countries.
Since I’m in Europe, we don’t really have paper with bisphenol anymore, but that’s not the case everywhere.
If the substances used are known to be toxic is another matter but you won't know that even with a correct label because it takes time for us to find out that new substances are toxic.
To the GP, if the goal is to avoid phenol papers, phenol papers tend to develop deeper black. And in the US, phenol-free papers are new enough the backside often advertises it. Some are very misleadingly labeled BPA-free, which usually means it's made with the very similar and likely equally toxic BPS.
Seriously though, I'm going to try your idea with the receipt printer (I didn't need an excuse to buy it, no-no, that's not it, haha) and I'll see if it can help me. Sadly, even games cannot interest me for long enough; the longest I could play a game, recently, is a week, then I abandon it.
There is also one that is called "tody" that we didn't try out. Both require a small subscription fee though, which I really dislike. I wish I had found a nice open source alternative. Besides the subscription fee (which was like 18€/year for us both), I have no complaints yet about the app.
I absolutely love how you show and tell, by having an article with an EXP system. But when do I get skill unlocks? I'm really hoping to be able to enjoy your next article with upgrades.
Haha, I’m planning to make a real mini-game for an upcoming article!
My flow is the right kind of coffee. It energizes and allocates. The lavazza espresso 100% arabica is the current that works. Try it out!
If our UIs were more skeumorphic would that help with all this and remove the need for the physical printer?
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.
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).
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?
They also have the advantages associated with not being physical of course.
When you go digital, your brain is writing the sticky note, but also has in its cache the instructions for the menu, the apps you normally use, that annoying notification, etc, plus your rl context. But on physical, you only have loaded the instructions for the pen and paper (and your rl context).
Having too many things in mind can reduce your executive function battery. Hope this helps! (ofc, this is an oversimplification of ADHD)
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.
When I need to coax my kids (7 and 10) into completing a tedious list of chores, like cleaning their room and playroom, practicing their instruments, and doing their homework, I also reach for the post-its. They each get their own color and we talk through the best way to break things down, arrange them in a backlog on the wall, set a timer, and agree to meet when the timer goes off to review our progress.
Thank you for your very interesting message!
(¹) https://printercow.com
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 :)
Instead made a single issue with a table and each row having an emoji, item title, and when complete link to the fix. As new items were identified I added a row with emoji for 'not started'. Had emoji's were 'under construction', 'already done above', 'not needed', etc. This snowballed with me completing one item per day over 30 days until it was all done. I'm called it EDD Emoji-Driven-Development.
In Sleek (todo.txt for linux) I can have multiple txt with multiple context inside.
On the other hand, I don't think pomodoros are strictly 25 minute sessions. I can setup any structure in my pomodoro app of choice Solanum and chain sessions.
> the crosshair briefly changes to confirm the hit, damage numbers pop up above the enemy, sound effects, enemy death animations, a progress bar filling up, a new skill unlocked, random reward and more...
I wonder if we can gamify todo apps in the same way, most are too boring and too corporate. It should implement all gaming bells and whistles for ensuring you complete your tasks.
I am working on an app!
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 to the work to get it to hit harder: Working by others (social/peer), snacks (biological rewards), free caffeine, money (sometimes lots), etc. And physical trinkets.
We have studied this to death in other parts of our own biology, like food. Unhealthy food/drink is fun. It's a pleasurable reward sometimes, but if it forms the basis for your diet you are going to have a lot of trouble enjoying healthy stuff. You can't outrun a bad diet. You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down. You have to treat the underlying problem: A hugely stimulating / rewarding thing is displacing the healthy stuff. Almost every piece of sane health advice after 1900 has focused on removing unhealthy factors first.
Work/hobby is no different. When I'm obsessed with factorio (it happened a lot once or twice), I find it harder to focus on work. When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.
I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
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 see other notifications, check and app quickly, or more generally, break flow as we have to switch to another device and back again.
All of this seems like a suboptimal solution.
1. use 'pass' to save the secret: 'pass edit work.secret' <enter it and quit>
2. use oathtool to generate 2fa given a secret:
' #!/bin/bash
oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" >&1 '
use it like '2fa work'
If you have 'xsel' you can even do
'oathtool -b --totp "`pass show $1.secret`" | xsel -ib'
to copy it to clipboard automatically.
`bash -c 'xfce4-screenshooter -r -o zbarimg | gxmessage -title "Decoded Data" -fn "Consolas 12" -wrap -geometry 640x480 -file -'`
Works great if you have xfce4-screenshooter, gxmessage, and zbarimg installed. It allows you to draw a box around a screen region, screenshots it, decodes it via zbarimg, and pipes the output into a dialog box with copyable text.
With that, you can do
[1] https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otpAlthough the nice thing about CLI workflows is that I can easily run it by SSHing into my phone (just make sure you set up GPG so the passphrase prompt will appear in your terminal, and not as a popup on the phone!)
Getting the credentials loaded could be a bit of a pain without a camera for QR code scanning. Easiest solution would be via Bluetooth to a companion app, which you would probably want anyway for periodic time sync (likely wouldn't be worth it to embed a GNSS receiver just to update the time).
Probably be a pretty small market, but as a niche Kickstarter device? I could see a small but loyal customer base.
If you grab it from a plugged-in yubikey, you can copy and paste it. That seems way easier
It does—if you carry the Yubikey you don't need a phone.
https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2022-10-17-otp-on-wrist/
They also do single-token cards: https://www.token2.com/shop/category/programmable-tokens
GNSS spoofing is trivial now and it's an extremely useful way to manipulate a target device's idea of time, which breaks all sorts of things. (SSL certificate validity periods...)
But for your specific problem there is a simple solution that isn't particularly expensive. Buy a new phone. Install 2FA on it, and don't install anything else.
I really wish they'd just stick to classic TOTP.
Why not save the secret on your laptop and generate the OTP on your laptop?
I personally use an Android emulator on my laptop, which achieves the same goal. It saves and restores state automatically for quick startup.
Let's do a quick threat model on putting both passwords and MFA tokens in a 1password vault.
1Password employees a recovery key + password login by default, and logging into a vault requires you to either have a device with the encrypted vault on it and your password, or have knowledge of your password and knowledge of your recovery key (normally in a file which makes it something you have) essentially traditional 2fa needed to log into a new device.
If someone steals your phone with 1password installed - they need your 1password to be able to access your credentials on the physical device. At that point they already have both your factors - your phone (have) and your password (know) - still protected by 2fa.
If someone manages to fully root your computer, they could wait until you unlock your vault and then extract your credentials. However, if you use traditional 2fa on a separate device - then they can just wait until you log into the target app, and then ride your session and get the same level of access to the target. While there may be a small difference in level of effort or how long it takes, the same access level is possible, and the requirements are that they have very privileged access to your operating system. Someone rooting the device that you login to services is grants them "single factor" access to your services when you access them.
There is some subtle differences between these, but except for situations where you have very high privileged requirements, at which point you should be using yubikeys or standalone MFA devices, using 1Password with OTP and password is very comparable to using a separate device for MFA.
I'm a previous red teamer and currently a blue teamer.
Though i have no idea, that's just how i internalized it over the years. In your 1Pass example, it's a single attack vector (the password of my 1pass) to compromising both the token and the password of the product/server/thing.
Eg a hacker can access my computer, even have a clipboard/keylogger on my machine, and have a difficult finding my token if it's on my phone. They need to attack my phone and my computer.
Having them both in your unlocked 1Password vault means if someone walks by your computer they can access your account. A single location with both of your "2FA". If they had a keylogger installed on your machine, they only need your single 1Pass password to breach your "2FA".
Granted i imagine that a Phone TOTP would still be a concern with a keylogger on your PC, since you still enter it on your compromised machine. Still more difficult than the having the totp key though, of course.
For that matter, how do they prevent you from using the same password for both?
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 service you use.
Compromising or stealing a device is a significant escalation from guessing passwords.
Thanks for sharing a potentially useful tool but I will not use it without a lot more details about how this browser extension secures the 2FA secrets from sketchy websites/ads.
url freedom.to
Or just disable notifications. The iphone has a do not disturb mode that can be scheduled.
"So long as [employer's] access management vendor... supports the use of physical two-factor authentication devices (for example, a YubiKey), [employer] shall make such devices available to Employees upon their submission of a request for the device."
The only information we were sent to get this all setup was specifically for a phone. The portal that exists to add devices only appears to support phones.
I have a co-worker who simply tried to use Authy instead of MS Authenticator and it didn’t work. There is a lot of bureaucracy that typically makes it not worth the fight.
I understand where you're coming from though, and I think this is where OS features like Focus Modes come into play.
When I'm in a "Work" mode, I literally don't see notifications from most of my apps. They don't show up in the notification center, or on app icon badges, or anywhere.
This takes a few minutes to set up, but once it's in place, it's fantastic. I also do this for other aspects of my life: Photography, Research, etc. When I'm in those modes, I don't want to see anything except for the apps that are specific to what I'm doing. It's worth the effort of setting this up IMO, and extends far beyond just work.
Along the same lines the Meta Wayfarer[2] smart glasses lets you take slice of life photos and videos without needing to whip out your phone. You lose a ton of quality but stay in the moment more. The AI features are getting better so eventually you'll be able to use it for basic information lookup.
0 - https://guide.duo.com/apple-watch
1 - https://guide.duo.com/duo-wear
2 - https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/wayfarer
I think humans crave freedom and free time, with good health more than anything else. This frees you up to care about doing things which we feel more rewarding and fun.
Several times you are better off skipping the drills and rituals and just focus on making lots of money as quickly as possible. And of course competing to accumulate more money just for the heck of it is equally demotivating as well. Focus what you want from the money and that is likely to move you along better use of your time and effort.
yeah and i figured thats fine !
I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.
I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.
i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that occurs often, some things just lose that sparkle with the time, and it’s okay, you just need to find a new way to make your task. This article is a good example of how you can do this, and, with some time, change your methods!
Some things require larger blocks of time. For example, you need several days in line to take a vacation; you can't simply take "5 minutes of vacation" every day. Some things are done much better if you dedicate an entire day, or at least a few consecutive hours to them: whether it is learning something new, writing a blog article, relaxing, hanging out with your friends, etc.
It would be more natural to work 16 hours a day when you feel like it, and then take a day off.
- It reduces the subconscious slot-machine mechanic (compared to refreshing a Web page) since I know there won't be anything new in my feed for the next several hours.
- There are also tangible benefits to using a proper feed reader, like only seeing unread items. That also discourages "cheating", since reading things outside of my feeds will require me to mark them as "read" after the next update.
I receive comment-replies via email, filtered into an IMAP folder that refreshes a bit faster than the RSS feed, to allow conversations.
These don't have notifications, but if I'm in the mail reader I can see their unread count (usually zero; and hence can be dismissed with a glance)
Unfortunately, that part of the brain usually sucks at coming up with an alternative plan, and "do something else, anything" is not very actionable. And you still need to pay your bills somehow.
The natural reward for work is work done. I don't need a motivational system to do the dishes. The motivation is seeing the dirty dishes gradually disappear, and the kitchen become cleaner. I don't need to create pieces of papers to represent that, because it is already happening right there, in real life.
If I work on a project, it helps to specify all things that need to be done (as opposed to working on something open-ended), so that I can see how I am getting closer to the moment of "done". A nice thing about test-driven development is that you produce a set of checkboxes first, and then you gradually check them off. Even if the work is open-ended, if I keep thinking about new features that would be nice add, it helps to specify a "version 1.0", and after achieving it, a "version 2.0", etc. The idea is that after each version I can take a break and feel that my work is done.
The least motivating thing is probably the job, as an employee. You work for 8 hours a day (generously assuming no overtime). There is no way to complete those 8 hours in e.g. 4 hours of working harder and then take a walk. In theory, if you do Scrum, you should have a certain reasonable amount of work assigned per sprint, and if you do it faster, then I guess you can take a short break and do something enjoyable (such as refactoring). In practice, almost no one does Scrum by the book; you will probably be randomly interrupted by extra tasks, and given unrealistic deadlines to avoid the possibility of completing the work earlier.
Another demotivating thing about the job is that there is no personal consequence of completing a project; you immediately start working on a new one. The natural response to completing a work is to congratulate yourself and take a break. But at work, the vacations are mostly unrelated to projects. Also, you are paid per time spent working, not by the number of projects finished. So it is all disconnected.
So I guess it all needs to be a part of some greater project, which can possibly be completed one day. Such as, putting your money in index funds, and planning to retire as soon as you reach a specified amount. Then each day you can congratulate yourself for getting 0.01% closer to the goal. (Or you can save money for other specific things, if that is what you desire.)
My problem is typically more that there are plenty of more interesting things to do than anything I'd like to do right now.
Exercise is annoying, as without a lot of modern life, it largely takes care of itself. Back when I could just walk to a grocery, as an easy example, it was unsurprisingly easy to stay in decent shape.
Man no offense but this sounds devastatingly sad. "We must starve ourselves of fun so that the barest excitement at work feels good."
Much like people that struggle with their weight need to turn every meal into accounting for lean protein and leafy vegetables.
Eventually, you crave the broccoli a bit more than you used to, and it makes the diet easier.
If not then you're already 'starving' yourself of the purest form of pleasure (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong). I don't think taking one step further is that sad.
Instead, there are many thousands of different substances which can elicit, heighten, prolong or enable pleasure; some illegal, some legal, some included in your favourite meals and snacks.
Even vanilla is a ”drug” which enhances pleasurable feelings. (Vanillin and ethylvanillin are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and consuming them will increase serotonergic and dopaminergic activity)
Yeah, I mean I think we barely know what that would even be. But some drugs come pretty damn close I'd wager, and I'm not talking about vanilla or ethylvanillin.
I think if you've dabbled in opiates, you've come pretty close to what the purest form of pleasure would feel like.
People unable to feel the full spectrum of pleasure sober have quite a different experience, since these substances completely eradicate any pain, grief, anxiety and stress that commonly prevents pleasurable feelings for occurring.
Having had fentanyl for a couple of surgical procedures, I am inclined to disagree. No one should feel that happy after having their colon inflated like a balloon or chunks of metal screwed into their bones.
Like this is clearly not healthy.
When I was a kid, I'd eat Trix cereal. I enjoyed it. Now - I find it sort of gross. It's too sweet. You can reach that same point with cake or pizza or a candy bar, etc. - in that, those foods become sort of gross. Foods like spinach become more satisfying. Not only that, but that satisfaction may yield a higher reward than you ever could with Trix cereal. But you'd never reach that higher level of satisfaction as long as you're eating Trix cereal every day.
That is extremely dependent on an individual's metabolism. When I was young I had hyperthyroidism and could not keep enough weight on. I could, and needed to, consume a huge amount of calories without gaining a pound. Now, my thyroid's burnt out, and my sleep is terrible, and it feels like I gain wait from breathing in air.
More specifically, when TFA talks about difficulty writing an email vs playing hours of video games, I thought it was worth mentioning that 2 hrs of factorio 3 or 4 nights a week might actually dampen the excitement of work a little by providing a perfectly tailored experience designed to engage the part of your brain that your employer would pay your for.
The analogy isn't about "hunger is the best seasoning" (although isn't that an apt colloquialism !), the analogy is insulin resistance is something like "dopamine resistance" both take consistent large over indulgences or poor decisions (however socially acceptable!) to cause a runaway effect which degrades "health".
Hope that's clearer. It's about establishing healthy habits not starving oneself.
Self-discipline looks different for everyone. I don't think it's necessarily unhealthy.
A desirable (practical) reality would seem to stem not just from first order effects now, but also in summation of all the credits and debits that it leaves us over time.
Don't worry, that rule only applies to poor people!
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More seriously, how long does it take to stop the dopamine high? Could we schedule our lives so that we would e.g. spend one month doing the most exciting things ever... followed by three days of meditation... which would make us ready for a few months of hard work... and then do it again?
You know, so that we are still productive at work, but don't have to sacrifice most of the joy in life to achieve that.
Interestingly these seemed to be one of the messages of Severance, and Dylan's character even appeared to have ADHD
Sorry for being off-topic, but you actually can (not a scientist, just speaking from experience). My guess is the digestion slows down and the sugar gets released into the system at a slower rate (probably because of the lower overall Glycemic index?). Anyways, it actually works! Just eat your salad before the ice cream to make sure it does :)
Hard agree, and yes we have our vices, but wouldn't life be better if we had more agency over them?
My phone is overwhelmingly a detriment to my life, it's just disguised as a necessary utility by doing the same things I could do anyway if I didn't have it. It's not never uniquely valuable to me, but those rare signals don't need to be tightly coupled with so so so much noise.
The big one for me lately is the aptly named tethering. It's wild that it's not just built into my mac at this point, if it weren't for that, (maybe 2Fa as well) I'd leave the phone at home so often I'd probably forget about it, and I long for that future.
Think about games where you're grinding doing tedious stuff to level up your character. Not nearly as fun, but still something you can end up doing for hours.
However, if the task ahead of me is great and I'm motivated, then I automatically seek less novelty to focus on it. IOW, maintaining a boring baseline of routine so that novelty is selective is important as a way of being able to "jump into action". It's good to get off the phone. It doesn't replace the intrinsic motivation.
There's an aspect to productivity advice that is about shouting down your burnout by adding more productivity hacks or taking stimulants or flagellating oneself. Burnout's root cause has to be approached by asking the tougher questions about life and aligning with a philosophy that is truthful to that. The work itself will have moments of routine boredom, exhilaration, and heartbreak, but the motive has to endure all of it.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.
Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.
Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).
As for variable interval rewards, I knew about the concept, but I did not include it in the article because it is already too long, and also because I have not yet found a smart way to use it in my productivity system.
Maybe it'd be fun to combine this with your receipts, where random tasks reward points to earn prizes.
Or maybe this is just more procrastination!
Well, what is life but procrastinating on death?
Oh you sweet summer child.