Comment by PaulHoule
2 days ago
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.
"I got a shiny task!"
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.
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Now you've got me thinking about hacking one of these into my home network for random reminders or even silly prints from friends.