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I geeked out a bit, after reading another blog post, and used my thermal printer for this. I've been using it for a few weeks now. The little sticky notes it makes are great.

https://joeldare.com/trying-to-stop-procrastination-with-my-...

I am starting to collect too many of them though. I kinda like the idea of ops text-file because it is renewed from day to day. I'm still not quite sure how to deal with the items I know I need to get to eventually but that I won't get to today. I'm also not sure how to deal with the pile growing continually.

I have noticed that thermal notes fade relatively quickly. When they do that I have to think about weather I want to reprint them or just throw them out.

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The recent HN thread on receipt printers for task tracking had this comment which I wish got some attention and replies:

"The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270076

(I suspect that’s part of too many browser tabs hanging around, too)

> "The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on."

I worked in this space for some time. Solving the backlog problem is the holy grail of To-Do systems. I am convinced it is a solvable problem.

The reason there are a bajillion To-Do apps and strategies right now is because a working UX for a digital task-keeping system is still not figured out. To simply put it, no To-Do app 'works' right now. Many of them work well enough for some people to depend on them to some extent.

One of the major reasons for failure is the backlog problem. It's surprisingly difficult, it's at the crossroads of human psychology and the varying real life tasks and responsibilities of real people. Real world is messy.

You'll see To-Do apps "work" out-of-the-box for most people and be hugely beneficial when:

- You see research papers comparing different strategies for To-Do task scheduling, cognitive load of different UI views, etc.

- Popular To-Do apps converge. They'll likely look nothing like the scheduled-checklist style apps of today.

- People start depending on them in managing most areas of their life.

Right now the To-Do app industry is competing on who has the shiniest UI. Very few players are even acknowledging the backlog problem.

Personally, I tried everything under the sun from using a single .txt file to custom-designed software. I have ADHD. Right now the thing that works best is a physical Bullet Journal. It works because of the friction of paper and pen. It mostly solves the accumulating backlog problem.

I came across a similar post on YouTube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg45b8UXoZI - it's titled "I Fixed My ADHD with a Receipt Printer".

I should build one that sends me an SMS message instead. So I stumbled on AT+ plus code for programing GSM devices. I have a MTN HUAWEI E303 modem from back in 2016 and I wrote a server using the npm serialport module.

I just need to write a dmenu script that pipes from every 3 git commits.

  ```txt SMS from :mtn-E303-sms-server
  -------------------------
    PROJECT: ppc-v.1.0
  -------------------------
     Commits: 3
     New Features Added!
     Bugs Squashed
     Code Cleaned Up
  -------------------------
    Total XP: +150
    Keep it up! 
  -------------------------
  ```

That should keep my monkey brain hooked for a while he he.

└── Dey well

How do you (or do you plan to) use SMS as a todo list? I can't even remember to reply to someone who texted me when I as busy.

I've seen mention of using the dot matrix printers common in restaurant kitchens as an alternative which doesn't fade; they have the added benefit of two-color printing (most do black and red)

>I have noticed that thermal notes fade relatively quickly. When they do that I have to think about weather I want to reprint them or just throw them out.

Or if you don't catch them before they fade, the task must not have been important..

Yeah the thermal printer one made the rounds here too, I've been curious to see how it's been going the last couple months for the people that adopted it.