Stop procrastinating—accomplish items on your to-do list! This new candy-based “Kanban board” will amaze and shock you when it doubles your productivity! Results not guaranteed.

Background:

One popular method of organizing items that need to be done is the “Kanban board” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_board) (e.g. the web site Trello).

Conceptually, this resembles a to-do list with categories as columns. Each item to be done a single sticky note (Figure 1).

1-to-do-list-normal — ***Fig. 1:*** Here is a basic Kanban-style to-do “list” with sticky notes on a whiteboard. Some of these tasks are quite annoying, and may be postponed for a long time! That snake will have the run of the garage forever, at this rate.

The issue:

Unfortunately, it’s often hard to get motivated to do items on a to-do list, especially if there is no appealing inherent reward.

Proposal:

In order to fix this procrastination-promoting scenario, we simply use clear tape to affix a pice of candy to each to each sticky note (Figure 2).

2-to-do-list-with-candy — ***Fig. 2:*** *The board above has been modified in a cheap and easy-to-set-up manner: a single piece of candy is taped to each not-yet-completed task.*

When a person completes a task, they are allowed to eat the piece of candy that is taped to the task’s card.

For especially time-consuming tasks (e.g. “file taxes”), one could imagine taping several dozen small chocolates to the note in order to provide sufficient motivation.

PROS: Allows even the most unrepentant procrastinator to get motivated to accomplish a task.

CONS: May have negative health consequences for people who are especially productive, thus reducing their overall productivity. A paradox indeed.