I have a major problem with organization.
In my household, I am subjected to very large amounts of distraction and context-switching. People ask me to do things immediately and don't really persist/write down anything, leaving me to do the logging.
As someone with an ADHD diagnosis, this is hell on earth. Even with medication, it's very difficult. My loss of focus and cognitive load increases exponentially the more this happens. The bus factor for complex tasks in my household ranges between 1 to 1.5.
So I wanted a tool to help me manage the influx of requests. I wanted to build something just for me, as I can't rely on any of the requesting parties to adopt any kind of convention. I needed to build an assistive tool.
Most of the distractions happen while I'm at my machine, with headphones on, in the flow. So I need a very quick method of entering tasks: a key combination to enter a task and its description, and then persist it somewhere.
I also wanted something that you can't get normally: the ability to carry my tasks over to the physical world in a way that didn't have me setting aside time to do migrations, management, etc. of a task board.
So I bought a receipt printer, some corkboard, pins, and dragged up my programming language: #nova
The printer spoke ESC/POS: it's a command stream that relies on 7-bit ASCII and use of control characters like ESC to configure things like text styling, print position, font configuration, and even image printing.
I can pipe bytes to the printer device, exposed as /dev/usb/lp0 on my machine, and it'll hum away executing them. My only prerequisite was being able to dump bytes to standard out.
Within a few minutes, I had tickets printing. I can quickly enter new tasks with a key combination, print out pending tasks, and even attach due-dates to them!
For tasks I get done, I put the slips of paper in a glass jar, as a reminder of my progress. For ones I don't get done, they go on the corkboard: a viusal indicator of what I still need to do. I can re-arrange them, sort them, do whatever I want with them.
I don't usually like calendars or large planning boards: I can very easily shut down if I look at the big picture for too long. With this system, I can wake up, grab the relevant tasks for today off the printer, and just go.
We'll see how it goes!
