Category: Personal Development

Reckoning | Beckoning #poem

Note: This poem has a three column structure so if you are reading it on a small screen device you should switch from ‘mobile’ to ‘tablet’ view to see it properly…

Reckoning?

It is time to rid myself
of
reckoning

The harsh
interrogation of
“How did it go?”

Checking off the actions
against
all those on my list

Only really noticing
the many
I have missed

Assessing my
progress, comparing
with my plan

Keeping track of
distances,
measuring their span

Monitoring my
output so I always
know the score

Emerging with the
figures, highlighting
my flaws

Counting up the wins
and losses,
totaling
to find their sum

I feel kind of
useless when the
reckoning is done

or

and



or



or



or



or



or



or



or



or




so

Beckoning?

Instead, I will try to see
what’s
beckoning

A gentler
introspection
of my flow

Seeking the resonant
vibrations that prove that
I exist

Keeping mind wide open
so that
nothing is dismissed

Reminding myself
that all the time
I’m doing the best I can

Recognising that
what matters is
simply that I ran

Realising the damage
done by
always wanting more

Noticing the many things
born deep
within my core

Dispensing with
judgement,
to prove the worth
of all I’ve done

I embrace my
beckoning question
“What has come?”

(c) Tim O’Hare, February 2024

About this poem: This poem has its origin in a conversation that took place during my last coaching session a couple of weeks ago. I was recounting how terrible I am at following the plans I make and how this generates an intense feeling of frustration and results in me being in a constant spiral of planning, frustration, planning, frustration and a pervading sense of uselessness. I was challenged to come up with an alternative non-judgmental question that I could ask myself and responded almost instantly that I could replace “How did it go?” with “What has come?“. We played with this idea for a while – focusing on how my “What has come?” question would naturally lead me to draw out achievements, output and activities that had emerged from within me without triggering my natural tendency to measure progress, evaluate success and generally judge myself against the completely unnecessary and arbitrary ‘success criteria’ that I carry in my head. My coach loved my question and referred to it as my ‘beckoning question’…

The poem is written as two verses, one relating to the ‘reckoning question’ (on the left) and the other relating to the ‘beckoning question’ (on the right), but it is also possible to read the poem taking one line from each verse in turn and adding the additional bridging word (‘and‘, ‘or‘, ‘so‘) shown in italics between the two verses. I suspect that this layout won’t work very well if the poem is viewed on a small screen (mobile) device but hopefully it works well enough!

Extra Focus – Jesse J. Anderson #reading

I first came across Jesse J. Anderson’s work in June 2025 via a live-streamed episode of the ‘A Productive Conversation‘ podcast that I was able to view through my membership of Mike Vardy‘s online community The TimeCrafting Trust (this is a link to the specific episode: A Productive Conversation – Episode 625: Jesse J. Anderson Talks About ADHD, Extra Focus, and Finding Flow). It was an interesting and engaging conversation discussing Anderson’s book (Extra Focus: The Quick-Start Guide to Adult ADHD) that, amongst other things, highlighted the idea that whereas most neurotypical people are motivated by importance, people with ADHD tend to have a more interest-based motivational drive. One impact of this is that it is generally assumed that if a task is important, it will get done, and so much of the advice on how to get (more) things done focuses on how to make tasks more important – or at least to seem more important. I guess that for many, perhaps even most, such advice can be useful, but for those battling against the unseen challenges posed by possessing an ‘ADHD-brain’, things are often rather more difficult. Not only do commonly used motivation-boosting tricks not work much of the time, but the fact that they don’t work, and for no apparently good reason, adds a big dollop of frustration and even shame into the mix too.

In the podcast interview, Anderson talked through what he calls the 4 Cs: a simple framework designed to enhance motivation by appealing to the ADHD-brain’s focus on interest. The 4 Cs in the name each stand for a different word that captures an approach that could be used to try to stimulate motivation, namely:

  • CAPTIVATE – making tasks interesting
  • CREATE – using creativity and seeking novelty
  • COMPETE – stimulating interest via competition and challenge
  • COMPLETE – making use of deadlines and ramping up urgency

After viewing the livestream event, I was impressed with the openness and authenticity in the way that Anderson spoke, and so a few weeks later I listened to the audiobook version of the book. It was an interesting listen, but whilst I enjoy listening to audiobooks, I do find it difficult to hold on to the detail of much of what I have listened to, especially as most of my listening takes place while I am walking to and from work. Consequently, my notes from this first pass through the material are rather limited, basically consisting of a restatement of the 4 Cs framework, along with a set of related questions that can be used to try to build motivation towards the completion of tasks when necessary:

  • How can I make the task more interesting for me?
  • How can I approach the task in a different/creative way?
  • How can I add a competitive edge to the task?
  • How can I ensure that I obtain positive (external) feedback on completion of the task?

Apart from this, my notes only reveal one other thing that I was particularly struck by, namely an assertion that the commonly-given productivity advice to ‘Eat the Frog‘, as popularised by the business coach/author Brian Tracey, is not at all effective for many people with ADHD. [The idea behind ‘eat the frog’ is that you should tackle your most difficult, significant, tricky, and as a result high value, task as your first action each day]. Instead, Anderson suggests starting the day with some fun/easy tasks in order to build up what he calls ‘motivation momentum‘. This chimes with my own day-to-day experience, and was perhaps the first time I had come across this way of thinking about my preference for a ‘slow morning’ start, rather than seeing it as being related to having a ‘night owl‘ chronotype (something that I am not convinced I possess to any great extent).

The rather limited nature of my initial notes might suggest that the content of the book did not prove especially interesting. However, I obviously did feel that there was more in Extra Focus that might be useful, not only for me, but to pass on to the considerable number of neurodiverse/ADHD-brained students that I work with in my job as a university lecturer, because in December 2025 I decided to make a second pass through the book, but in print format. Looking at my fairly extensive notes, it’s clear that in this second reading I did a much more thorough job of working through the material…

Anderson starts out with some general thoughts about the challenges of ADHD, noting that calling it an attention deficit is inaccurate, and suggesting instead that it is better viewed as being a dysregulation of attention. He then sets out the 4 Cs approach and suggests that instead of eating the frog first, ADHDers might be better served by eating the ice cream first… something which sounds like a much better idea to me!

The book then moves into a fairly long list of different motivation-enhancing strategies, things like adding action verbs to tasks, altering your environment to make it more stimulating, finding a ‘body double’ to provide some external accountability, gamifying tasks, and racing against the clock. There was not much in this section that stood out to me, but I think this would be a useful section for someone who is at the start of their ADHD-adaptation journey.

The later part of the book has three areas of focus – TIME, MEMORY, and EMOTION – and I think that all three of these sections contain useful content and advice. In particular, the chapter on Emotion, which covers topics such as ‘success amnesia‘ (the tendency to forget/ignore past successes), ‘imposter syndrome‘, ‘rejection sensitivity‘, ‘shame distortion‘, and ‘impulsivity and inhibition‘ might be quite eye-opening for readers who have not previously linked these characteristics or challenges to ownership of an ADHD-brain.

The book ends with encouragement that when you understand how your brain works you can use that knowledge to your advantage, guidance that may well seem obvious to many readers. However, my own experience of ADHD is that it can be very difficult, if not downright impossible at times, to understand how an ADHD-brain is working in any given moment. With this in mind, having a well-written and straightforward guide such as Extra Focus to lead you through consideration of many of the key related topics and ideas, can only be a good thing.

I’d say that of all the books I have read about coping with the challenges of owning an ADHD-brain, Extra Focus is up there in my top two or three. It’s written with the ADHD-brained reader in mind, in simple, plain language and has a clear emphasis on practical implementation throughout. Overall, I think it would be an excellent starting place for anyone new to exploring the challenges posed by an ADHD brain, whether driven by personal need, a desire to better understand or support a friend or family member, or just for general interest.

Now, where’s that tub of ice cream?

Four Thousand Weeks | Meditations for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman #reading

I’d better come straight out with it… I’m a huge fan of Oliver Burkeman’s writings, dating back to the days when he was a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper with a column delving into productivity-related topics. I read his first book, The Antidote (subtitle: ‘happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking’), back in 2015, and a few years ago I was lucky enough to attend a couple of fascinating online workshops that he led coinciding with the launch Four Thousand Weeks (FTW), the first of his two more-recent books that are my focus here. FTW was a book that really thrust Burkeman into the limelight, and I don’t think it is going too far to describe him as one of the most respected and influential voices in present-day discourse about the complex relationship with all seem to have with time.

Burkeman often describes himself as a ‘recovering productivity addict’, i.e. someone who in a previous phase of life had a voracious appetite for all of the latest productivity hacks and time management systems. This is a moniker that I could certainly apply to myself (especially as it is ‘recovering’ not ‘recovered’!), and so it’s no surprise that whenever I read anything written by Burkeman, or hear him speaking in an interview, I have an overwhelming feeling that he is peering directly inside my skull and is able to see and comprehend the inner workings of my brain!

Four Thousand Weeks was published in 2021, and I first read it pretty much as soon as I could get my hands on a copy, within a few weeks of the publication date. I found it so interesting and thought-provoking, that my initial reading was followed up just a few months later with another run-through the material, as I listened to Burkeman himself narrate the audiobook version. The basic premise of the book is that a typical human lifespan amounts to ~4000 weeks, and that recognising, and indeed embracing, this finite nature of life (it’s finitude), and thus appreciating that you simply cannot do all of the things you might feel that you should, or want to, do, is the secret to leading a sustainable, meaningful life (or at least a slightly less-frustrating and stressful one).

Burkeman’s most recent book, Meditations for Mortals (MFM), arrived on the scene in September 2024. Again, I read it almost immediately, having pre-ordered it as soon as it was possible to do so. MFM has a neat structure of 28 short chapters arranged into four sections, and is designed to be read one chapter per day over a period of four weeks. In this way, it forms a kind of manual that guides the reader through an exploration of many of the ideas introduced in FTW. After my first reading of MFM, I remember thinking that it would almost certainly be a good idea for me to re-read it on a fairly regular basis, perhaps annually, like a top-up dose of medicine for the mind.

I returned to FTW, and read it for a third time, in June 2025 when it was chosen as the monthly read for The TimeCrafting Trust Book Club that I participate in. That re-reading spurred me to listen to the audiobook version of MFM the following month. My feeling is that whilst FTW works pretty well as an audiobook, MFM is better consumed in physical form. In fact, I’m coming to the conclusion that most works of non-fiction don’t really work that well as audiobooks if you have any real hope of holding onto any nuggets of information or wisdom from them.

In the last year or so I’ve been making a particular effort to write notes and clip passages from the non-fiction books that I read. Sadly, I’m not really very good at doing this. Whilst I am well aware that book notes are of most value when they are a synthesis or personal summary of the material that is covered, I find that kind of note-making very difficult, and so my notes tend to be verbatim copies of phrases and passages that resonate with me in some way. I’d love to be able to write something more considered as I read, but I feel that to do so would take far too much time (that I think I don’t have), and require a lot of patience (that I am pretty sure I don’t have). [Here I find myself putting on my academic tutor voice to remind myself that ‘too much’ is a value judgement statement, and that the value that I get out of the time I choose to put into note-making is clearly directly influenced by my choice of how much time to put into the activity: small time in = probable low value, large time in = potential high value.]

Anyway, it probably won’t be a surprise for me to report that the notes that emerged from my most recent readings of FTW and MFM are extensive… This leaves me with a difficult decision to make in relation to how I go about writing the rest of this blog post. In fact, the need to make that decision is one reason why my blog post writing activity stalled in recent months, and it’s also why I am only now making significant progress writing this post having started it several days ago. What I probably ought to do is to review all of my notes, and synthesise them into a coherent whole that I can summarise in three or four nice, neat paragraphs. But, dear reader (if you exist!), I fear that to approach things that way will just result in yet more delay. [Again, I hear the academic tutor voice in my head telling me sternly that the job of a writer is to make things easy for the reader…]. Consequently, I’m not going to do that… Instead, there are, below, (mostly) a series of short passages taken directly from the text of one or other of the books, with a brief comment or response from me, a little bit like a conversation of sorts…

Four Thousand Weeks

OB: ‘it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do‘ (p30)
TOH: Well yes, that’s exactly the problem – there are so many things I want to achieve and so little time to achieve them..

OB: ‘Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life – because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never start it.‘ (p30)
TOH: I certainly don’t need much persuading that my chronic procrastination is a result of the fear that what I produce might not be enough to prove that I am as special as my upbringing steered me to believe that I am supposed to be.

OB: ‘You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.‘ (p55)
TOH: I know, I know, but it’s just so hard for me to let go of things. (although I guess I let go of them anyway, because I procrastinate so much that they never get done…)

OB: ‘Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts – because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.‘ (p75)
TOH: Exactly. That is absolutely what I do and have always done. I get so far with something, it gets a bit tricky, and so I move on to something else, with the result that I am constantly frustrated with myself for not finishing things. I think that because I was pretty good at most things at school, it was easy for me to make these switches, and so I never fully developed the skill of pushing through when things got difficult.

OB: ‘whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude‘ (p105)
TOH: I’ve seen this referred to as ‘comfortable-familiar-easy-life-syndrome’. And then you die of course.

OB: ‘The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.‘
TOH: Didn’t someone (Susan Jeffers) write a book once about this? ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’…

OB: ‘Other people hold off entirely from starting on important projects or embarking on intimate relationships in the first place because they can’t bear the anxiety of having committed themselves to something that might or might not work out happily in practice.‘ (p215)
TOH: Indeed, and especially when, like me, your sense of self-worth is almost entirely focused on demonstrating ‘specialness’.

OB: ‘Because now is all you ever get‘ (p219)
TOH: Okay, okay, you don’t have to rub it in.

OB: ‘taking on too many projects at once [is a way] of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things‘ (p220)
TOH: Some years ago, a colleague suggested to me that my difficulties stemmed from a need to be in control. At the time, I couldn’t square this idea in my head at all – I’ve never thought of myself as a control-freak – but over the last few years I have come to realise that yes, I’m very much constantly striving to feel some semblance of control over things/my life.

OB: ‘Let your impossible standards crash to the ground‘ (p222)
TOH: Far better to finish something and get it ‘out there’ than never finish is at all (or never even start it for that matter).

OB: ‘If you can face the truth about time in this way – if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human – you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfilment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rear-view mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but what working within the limits of your moment in history and you finite time and talents, you actually got round to doing – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing – whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.‘ (p228)
TOH: ‘what… you actually got round to doing’ [sigh]

OB: ‘The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.‘ (p234)
TOH: Okay, you’ve convinced me. I’ll make a really good plan of action and have a careful think about when the best time to get started on it will be… 😉

Meditations for Mortals

OB: ‘‘insecure overachievers’… our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy‘ (p21)
TOH: it’s strive, strive, strive to be special

OB: ‘perhaps you’ve tethered your self-esteem to the most crazy-making standard of all “realising your potential” – which means you’ll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realise?‘ (p21)
TOH: Well someone will tell me won’t they? Won’t they?

OB: ‘What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it.‘ (p39)
TOH: Have you read my poem? What If? So What?

OB: ‘What the novelist E.L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s “like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”.‘ (p48)
TOH: But that means being brave enough to embrace uncertainty… Perhaps I need to read my poem What If? So What? again!

OB: refers to an analogy from the book Time Surfing by Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk, in which tasks or areas of life that you are avoid are referred to as ‘gnawing rats’ and the suggestion is that rather than fearing them or feeling like you should fight them it is better to befriend then. He uses the example of sorting out your shed – the advice is simply to go and stand in the shed and just observe and take stock. Solutions will start to present themselves and some small actions may be taken. (p58)
TOH: I refer to these kinds of things as ‘bad smell tasks’ – the ones that seem to hang around on your to-do list for ever.

OB: describes the value of aiming to complete an activity ‘Dailyish’ rather than setting an unattainable ideal of completing it every single day
TOH: This is very much something that I have tried to embrace, since being introduced to the idea.

OB: ‘Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.‘ (p78
TOH: It’s all about the journey and not the destination as they say, or the difference between atelic and telic activities (or adopting an atelic versus a telic mindset to how you complete activities), as Keiran Setiya sets out wonderfully well in his book Midlife.

OB: ‘… if you see all of this [everyday life] as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, of feeling good about yourself – then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to ‘get through’ until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived.‘ (p122)
TOH: I can distinctly remember that when I was younger, I often wished that I was, say, ten years further on in life, which in my head was a time when I had ‘arrived’ and everything was as it should be. Life doesn’t work like that of course.

OB: ‘To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value’ (W. Somerset Maugham)‘ (p127)
TOH: Beautifully put, but also devastatingly damning! Perhaps it’s time to make a start on something… 😉

The Mountain Is You – Brianna Wiest #reading

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna West is probably not a book that I would have picked up to read of my own accord, despite that fact that I am pretty much certain that a lot of the struggles I have in pushing myself into action and gaining the sense of achievement and fulfillment that I crave are driven at a fundamental level by self-sabotage in one form or another. There is just something about the whole mountain metaphor, along with the kinds of words used in the book blurb that I read online (‘deep internal work of excavating trauma’, ‘building resilience’, and ‘adjusting how we show up for the climb’) that instinctively put me off. Why then did I work my way through this book for a few weeks in April and May this year? Because it was voted as the reading matter for the May meeting of The Timecrafting Trust Book Club that I participate in, and so, dutifully, I ordered myself a copy and set to work.

Almost from the start, I realized that there might well be a bit more value for me from The Mountain Is You than I had envisaged. I was immediately stuck with some obvious similarity between some of the content being covered and the ideas of psychotherapist Carl Jung that I found enthralling and thoroughly convincing when I read James Hollis’s excellent The Middle Passage a year or so ago.

Wiest begins her book by describing the various forms that self-sabotage can take along with the underlying reasons why each type of self-sabotaging behaviour occurs. There were quite a few lines in this section of the book that resonated with me…

  • ‘sometimes, we sabotage our professional success because what we really want it to create art‘
  • ‘sometimes, our most sabotaging behaviours are really the result of long-held and unexamined fears we have about the world and ourselves‘
  • ‘human beings experience a natural resistance to the unknown, because it is essentially the ultimate loss of control‘

… because yes, I do increasingly seem to be seeing myself as an artist, yes, I definitely have a lot of fears squashed down into my head that hold me back, and yes, I do tend to get overwhelmed and feel very uncomfortable when I perceive that things are spinning out of my control. But why then, knowing all of this, does nothing much really seem to change? Wiest delivers the killer answer:

‘most people do not actually change their lives until not changing becomes the less comfortable option‘

Wiest goes on to argue that, in fact, we might be better off re-framing self-sabotage because, ultimately, the habits and behaviours associated with it are actually a result of your very clever subconcious ensuring that some unfilled need, displaced emotion or neglected desire is being met – that those actions are, in fact, deliberately designed to provide a positive outcome that some hidden part of your subconscious seeks.

Aand funnily enough, just this morning, quite coincidentally, I wrote in my journal that perhaps I allowed myself to procrastinate and hold myself back from taking certain actions even though I know this will result in an intense wave of frustration and anger with myself, because at least those negative feelings and emotions are something that I am familiar with and are, in some weird and twisted way, somewhat comforting.

The next section of The Mountain Is You describes a long list of different manifestations of self-sabotage, and whilst many of these did not feel relevant to me, some of them certainly did – hello Perfectionism, Worrying About Least Likely Circumstances, Being Busy, Fear Of Failure, to name a few.

The start of the process of overcoming self-sabotage begins, Wiest suggests, with tuning into, and listening to, the negative emotions associated with it – things like anger, jealousy, regret, chronic fear. She highlights a basic need to be able to ‘allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgement or suppression and notes that understanding your needs, meeting the ones you are responsible for, and then allowing yourself to show up so others can meet the ones you can’t do on your own will help you break the self-sabotage cycle’. For example, feel angry, notice that you are angry, understand why you are angry, remember that it is okay to feel angry… and then get on with life.

There are then a couple of chapters with fairly standard fare on building emotional intelligence and on letting go of baggage from the past, but as these progressed I could feel the book moving steadily into the kind of territory that my initial instincts had led me to expect. Then, aargh, I hit a section titled ‘Releasing your past into the Quantum Field‘ and my brain was instantly screaming at me that I was now thoroughly into pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo land… the kind of land where, apparently, ‘You store … emotions, energies and patterns at a cellular level‘. Now, I guess that in some sense everything associated with an individual human is stored at a cellular level, but I am pretty sure that Wiest is suggesting there’s something rather more mysterious and perhaps spiritual going on. I’d be inclined to simply say that statements of that kind are just nonsense!

I guess that from that point onwards, my brain was in a state of high alert, warning me, perhaps unfairly, that much of what I was reading had no real, solid basis. There were lots of nice, almost mantra-like phrases: ‘be willing to be disliked‘, ‘do your inner work‘ and a series of suggestions to ‘create aligned goals, ‘find you inner peace’, ‘detach from worry’, ‘take triggers as signals’, ‘honour your discomfort’, ‘stop trying to be happy’, ‘arrive into the present’ etc., but in the end it was all a bit too much – too many suggestions, too many affirmations, too many challenges to think about overcoming, with the result that I came away confused and somewhat disappointed. After a promising, really very readable first half, everything seemed to have unraveled as the book reached its conclusion. There was just nothing much that was concrete or tangible for me to cling onto.

Late on in the book there was one phrase that I rather liked in a section titled ‘Be aware of what you give your energy’, namely that ‘the wolf that wins is the one that you feed‘ and strangely, on the day that I read those lines some spoke almost the exact same words to me (perhaps that pesky quantum field was doing its thing…). In fact, the whole book is stuffed full of short phrases and sentences that you could lift off the page and incorporate into an inspirational poster or social media post if that is your thing. I may not have warmed to Wiest’s mountain metaphor or felt that the argument in The Mountain Is You hung together in a fully coherent and convincing manner, but she certainly knows how to write what might be called ‘soundbite sentences’. Forget all the gumph about releasing you past into the quantum field and storing emotions at a cellular level, and take this phrase, right at the end of the book… …

‘One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.‘

BOOM!

Square Peg #poem

I am the square peg in the round hole:
jammed in,
stuck fast,
placed by youthful naivety,
forced down by the weight of expectation,
held in place by the pressure of life’s demands,
and hammered home
by the repeated blows of round pegs that,
although appearing far too large
to fill such a seemingly trivial space,
are really too small to even touch the sides.

Yet, even in the tightest grip
it is possible to wriggle and writhe –
tiny movements that, though causing damage, breaks, and pain,
gradually,
imperceptibly,
ease the bind.
The needle must break the cloth to form the stitches of repair.

I am still the square peg,
plugging the round hole,
missing parts of my surface,
diminished,
and wearing hidden scars,
but now I have worked my way loose.
And though I cannot know the planes and slopes
of the land that lies outside,
I have seen it in glimpses,
and I am ready to slide out,
with freshly rounded corners,
ready to roll.

(c) Tim O’Hare, September 2023

SQUARE PEG: This is another poem that came up on me out of nowhere and very fast. In some ways it is a direct continuation from my poem It Is Time, but whereas that poem is about recognizing that a point of arrival has been reached, Square Peg is more about being ready to start out on the next part of the journey.

The Productivity Diet – Mike Vardy #reading

The Productivity Diet is the latest book written by Mike Vardy. Mike, who is based in Victoria, British Columbia, on the western side of Canada, describes himself as a ‘seasoned productivity expert, writer, coach and podcaster’ (quoting from his own website biography), and it was through the latter, his podcast A Productive Conversation, that I first became aware of his work. I don’t know how I initially stumbled on this podcast but for some years I have been a sucker for consuming content related to productivity (or ‘how we operate’ as I prefer to think of it). At some point, listening to episodes of the podcast led me to signing up for Mike’s email newsletter and then, after he sent out a request for people who felt they had a tendency to get started later in the day to contact him, I ended up chatting with him via Zoom about the productivity challenges that I faced and the approaches to overcoming those challenges that I used. At the end of the call, I politely declined the opportunity to join a coaching course with him (£££!!!) but did sign up as a member of his online community The TimeCrafting Trust. That was in March 2024, and over the last 15 months I have got to know quite a few other members of the community, most of whom are based in North America, and participated in a wide range of online events including monthly Book Club meetings, podcast livestreams, workshops and seasonal planning sessions. I think it’s fair to say that whilst Mike and I have never met in person, I could properly describe him as a friend, albeit of the online variety.

But what of The Productivity Diet itself? Mike’s basic view is that we cannot ‘manage time’ and so, instead, we should focus on managing our attention, in particular taking into account how much energy we have at any moment. To paraphrase the book: Productivity isn’t about managing time. It’s about how we use it, how we relate to it, and how we move within it. Mike argues that we should eschew rigid productivity systems in favour of thinking about productivity as a continuous interaction between Intention, Attention, Reflection and Action. Mike’s approach, which he calls TimeCrafting, involves laying out some broad intentions for our areas of focus, but then navigating the reality of our daily experience with a sense of gentleness and responsiveness to our evolving needs.

The Productivity Diet was the subject of a Kickstarter Campaign that Mike started before I got to know him. I think there were a few hiccups along the way, but the book was launched successfully earlier this year. The launch included Mike making appearances on a number of other productivity-related podcasts, and when he announced that he was going to focus an episode of his own podcast on the book I thought it would be fun to offer my services as a stand-in ‘host’ so that rather than it being Mike Vardy having a productive conversation with himself, the episode had a more normal host-author format. A little to my surprise, and despite the fact that I have pretty much no experience of working in broadcast communications, Mike thought this was a good idea and we went ahead and had a lot of fun recording the episode. You can pick it up here if you’re at all interested: A Productive Conversation Episode 603.

There are three major pillars to TimeCrafting as set out in The Productivity Diet: Time Theming, Attention Paths and Reflection.

Mike is big on the first of these pillars, Time Theming, suggesting that it can be beneficial to designate different kinds of themes to act as guide-rails as you decide, in the moment, exactly what to do next. These themes are time-based, for example, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal or what are termed ‘horizontal’ themes where you select to focus your attention on a particular type of activity at the same time each day. At an even longer timescale, it is suggested that you adopt an ‘Annual Axiom’ – essentially a very short (e.g. three word) description to guide your overall approach to the year ahead. In the world of TimeCrafting, one might decide to group administrative tasks together to tackle on, say, Thursday, or to designate Friday as a day to consider finance-based activities, Tuesday for ‘creating’ etc. One might decide that the focus for the week ahead is, say, ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘correspondence’, or that the next month is for ‘growing contacts’ etc. A key aspect of Time Theming is that the themes are not meant to be a way to rigidly enforce a particular regime of action, but serve more as beacons to guide you back to an intended path if you move away from it. In addition, it is perfectly fine to do tasks and activities that do not match the current intended theme if there is time and space to do so.

The term ‘Attention Path‘ relates to a factor that will influence what you choose to, or can, focus your attention on at any given moment. The Productivity Diet introduces the acronym TREAT as a way to separate out five different types of attention path. TREAT stands for Time-based, Resource-based, Energy-based, Activity-based and Theme-based. The idea is that when selecting tasks to work on next, one considers the options in relation to each of these attention path types, asking questions like: Can this task be accomplished in the time I now have available? Do I have the resources I need to hand? Do I have the energy for this? Does it make sense to do this alongside some other similar task? Does this fit within my intended theme? I know from my interactions with him, that Mike is a firm believer in designating tasks as being low, medium or high energy so that, for example, when you hit a point in a day where you feel fatigued and might otherwise grind to a complete halt (as we all do…) you can glance at your list of possible tasks and pick one or two low energy tasks to accomplish. In this way, time which might otherwise be lost to the void of the internet (for example) can still result in some useful outcome.

The third pillar of TimeCrafting is Reflection. This is the key to continuous evolution and improvement. By reflecting on your actions, for example by writing in a journal, you can identify adjustments that can be made, obstacles to overcome, approaches that can be reinforced or extended. Without meaningful reflection there is no evidence base to use to help inform the decisions you make about what to do when and how etc., and so everything just unfolds somehow in a rather haphazard manner.

I will admit that in my own day-to-day operations, I have not had a great deal of success in using daily, weekly or monthly themes. I think my work days are too variable and I do not have sufficient control over exactly what needs to be done when, for them to work in a very consistent manner. But I think that having the general approach in mind is still helpful, especially at the longer timescales (‘this week/month I will focus on finishing X’). I have had more success with horizontal theming, but the variability of my days (sometimes I have classes to teach, other days I have a meeting etc) means that my attempts to impose order on my day through horizontal themes is generally most successful during the earlier and later (non-work hours) parts of each day. Similarly, I do consider attention paths to some extent, but I find that once my day is underway I tend to forget my plans and just go with the flow. It doesn’t help that I am not very good at checking in with myself to consider whether I would benefit from re-directing my attention (even setting reminders to do this doesn’t work very well – I just ignore them much of the time!). It’s not that I think the ideas underlying TimeCrafting are not valid, quite the reverse really, but I just seem to revolt against any attempt to constrain or direct my attention even though I would very much like to be able to do so!

I like the general approach of TimeCrafting that is set out in The Productivity Diet. I’ve tried to implement what might be called ‘heavier’ systems – things like time-blocking/time-boxing – and whilst they seem to offer an attractive level of control, I always (and quickly) end up revolting against them as my feelings in the moment take over. TimeCrafting offers a more gentle, sensitive, approach to keeping yourself on track, or at least somewhere close to being on track. To use a travel analogy, TimeCrafting is like having a traditional map, understanding what all of the symbols mean and knowing generally where you want to end up, but allowing yourself flexibility to move around the terrain, informed by the map, in the way that feels most appropriate at the time. This seems to me to be a much better way to travel than to switch on the SatNav and following it blindly to the selected destination, even when the road you have just been instructed to turn down is clearly little more than a rough and ever-narrowing track heading to an almost inevitable dead end and a ton of frustration as you try to turn around or back-up, surrounded by a herd of angry cows. Give me the map and my intuition any day!

Tiny Experiments – Anne-Laure Le Cunff #reading

I read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s debut book, Tiny Experiments, just a month after it was released in March 2025. However, this was not my first sight of the key ideas that the book contains, because I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of 300 people participating in a series of four, weekly online workshops, led by Le Cunff, that took place in February, in the lead up to the book’s publication. These workshops and the online community that accompanied them was called The Curiosity Collective, the name giving prominence to what is perhaps the key theme running Le Cunff’s work – the exhortation to live life in ‘curious mode‘, always willing to explore and experiment with your approach to life, and how you operate in the world. My experience attending those online workshops, showed me that Le Cunff is a highly skilled communicator and excellent teacher, and so I approached reading Tiny Experiments with high expectations. As an added bonus, the book had been chosen as the April pick for The TimeCrafting Trust Book Club.

As noted above, curiosity lies at the heart of Le Cunff’s ideas, and this is most obviously seen in her simple, four-part model for exploring and implementing change in your life. This model is rather neatly captured by the word sequence: PACT > ACT > REACT > IMPACT. At the start of the book, Le Cunff encourages the reader to adopt the mindset of a ‘self-anthropologist’, observing how they act in the world and the outcomes of these results, and then asking questions in relation to these observations. Le Cunff then structures the bulk of the text around her four-step model, stressing the importance of moving away from a Linear Mindset (X leads to Y leads to Z – end of story) towards the adoption of an Experimental Mindset based on the implementation of continuous experimental loops. My own feeling is that the key message here is not really about the distinction between linear v looping but, rather, one of ongoing adaptation and experimentation. The experiments one conducts don’t need to be thought of as loops (in fact they probably won’t bring you back to near your starting point) but they should take you somewhere, and in the process provide valuable evidence to help you work out what you might experiment with and where you might go next.

In the PACT phase of her model, Le Cunff presents a really neat (because it is simple) template for setting up what she refers to as a Tiny Experiment (an exploration of what happens when you make some small, realistic and manageable shift in the way that you operate). This template – a PACT – takes the following form:

“I will [action] for [duration]”

The key here is make sure that the action is purposeful, actionable (something that you can reliably perform), continuous (i.e. repeatable and not changing from day-to-day) and trackable. It is also important to be specific about the duration of the experiment (or else the number of repetitions). This ensures that the experiment is set up so that it provides a large enough dataset for meaningful conclusions to be drawn, but does not continue for so long that the action becomes tedious, or redundant or of little continued value. Essentially, the whole point of the PACT is to provide information that can then be used to adapt future behaviour and experiments, and not as a means to try to establish new habits.

In the ACT phase, you set about completing the activity specified in the PACT. This section of the book has some interesting material exploring the powerful forces of procrastination and, associated with this, perfectionism, that can so easily derail progress towards a goal.

The third phase of the model, REACT, occurs once the action described in the PACT has been completed for the specified duration. At this point, the goal is to look for, and then consider, evidence of the results of the action. Le Cunff highlights that it is important to look for evidence from within/internally (reflection) and externally (feedback from others, evaluation of results). Here, she presents what I suspect will become the most significant legacy of Tiny Experiments, namely her simple PLUS- MINUS-NEXT framework for reflection: what went well, felt good – what challenges or obstacles you faced, what was difficult, what negative feelings emerged – and then how the insights gained can shape future actions. [But whilst this framework is neat and seems to be catching on in the productivity community it might be noted that it is not so very different from the well-established ‘plus-minus-interesting’ framework.]

Because the whole point of Tiny Experiments is to encourage the adoption of an Experimental Mindset towards life, the REACT reflection should lead to a decision being made in relation to the area being investigated by the PACT. Le Cunff suggests that there are three possibilities: PERSIST – prolong the pact, or PAUSE – quit the pact or put it on hold, or PIVOT – modify the pact or shift the focus of a subsequent pact.

The final section of Le Cunff’s framework, IMPACT, focuses on the idea that it is helpful to be open/public about what you are setting out to achieve with your PACT and/or to work with others when pursuing it. This is largely a matter of gaining a useful chunk of external accountability, and also valuable feedback, but having seen many ‘public’ statements of Tiny Experiments PACTs in Le Cunff’s online community Ness Labs and on social media more generally, it is clear that it also serves as a powerful tool to market and promote Le Cunff’s ideas.

I enjoyed reading Tiny Experiments, and I feel pretty sure that it will be the kind of book that continues to have presence in the market for some time. It is well written and nicely structured, and the core ideas are simple (which is a good thing) and neatly presented, such that they have every chance of ‘sticking’. I think the phrase ‘Tiny Experiments‘ will likely become part of the productivity lexicon in similar fashion to James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits‘. I also think that the “I will [action] for [duration]” statement for a PACT, the ‘PACT-ACT-REACT-IMPACT‘ model (or at least the ‘PACT–ACT–REACT‘ part of it) and, in particular, the ‘PLUS-MINUS-NEXT‘ framework for reflection, will all end up having a healthy existence outside the printed pages of the Tiny Experiments book…

… but in the end, my enthusiasm for Tiny Experiments waned. I had several goes at defining pacts and conducting experiments, but I wasn’t able to make myself see any of them through to a satisfactory conclusion. Life got in the way, and I found myself ignoring my pacts and carrying on with my usual scattergun approach to trying things out. This, of course, probably says more about me than it does about the potential efficacy of Le Cunff’s ideas, but my experience was that despite the simplicity and neatness of the Tiny Experiments model, it did not possess enough power to persuade me to go all in with it. I have also felt that most of the Tiny Experiments that I have seen others setting out to pursue would really be much better described as ‘tiny habits’ (a phrase already coined by the author B.J. Fogg and, of course, rather similar to James Clear’s ‘atomic habits’), rather than tiny experiments, and to put it bluntly, many of them read like tiny morsels of misty-eyed, wishful thinking…

So, in the end I congratulate Anne-Laure Le Cunff for writing a really nice book that captures some neat ideas and makes some good general points, but despite the fact that I am still indulging in some daily ‘plus-minus-next’ reflection, I can’t say that it has turned me into a Tiny Experimentalist.

Poetry #poem

I do not know if my poems are any good,
but it seems they help my essence to be understood,
whether by others or simply by myself,
this last, of course, itself essential for my health.

I do not know if my poems are enjoyable to read,
but it seems that crafting them fulfils some vital need,
and that allowing thoughts and feelings to gush forth
provides a compass I can use to find my north.

It seems as if through searching for each rhyme
I’ve stumbled on a way to slow down time,
and that now, through sculpting syllable-istic rhythm,
I see the world in multitudinous ways –
split infinite like sunlight passing through a prism.

And so, once more, I drop into the mine,
to chip away and work the line,
to trace the seam right to its core,
and scrape out all the mineral ore.
I hammer hard to split a rock,
in hope it is a nugget-bearing block,
in hope it might just be the one to hold
a precious, piece of sparkling gold.

I do not know if my poems hit the mark,
but certainly they’ve lit a spark.
So now the flames inside me roar,
and I can ask for nothing more.

Here goes…
First, time slows,
an idea flows,
like water spurting from a hose.
The seedling grows.
The petals unfurl upon the rose.

I take my chance…
Falling deep into the trance,
where visions glance,
words prance,
and rhythms dance.
And then I emerge, life enhanced.

In those moments, my whole world collapses onto a single spot.
So much energy compressed into a tiny dot-
freezing cold yet furnace hot.
I do not know if my poems are any good.
I do not know if my poems are enjoyable to read.
I do not know if my poems hit the mark.
It matters not.

(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023

POETRY: I had some nice feedback on the first few poems that I wrote, but as this all came from people that knew me well it was impossible not to feel that it must be biased, even if only subconsciously. I began to think about whether my poems really were any good. This is the kind of thinking that usually drains my motivation and stops me in my tracks. But I have changed a bit in recent months, and pondering this a little more, I was able to acknowledge that whether or not anyone else liked my poems, I enjoyed the process of creating them, and was learning about myself as I did so.

Liminal Thinking – Dave Gray #reading

Liminal Thinking: Create the change you want by changing the way you think by Dave Gray is a book that I have toyed with reading for some time. I remember the occasion, quite a few years ago now, when, sat in a presentation at a Teaching and Learning Conference at work, I first encountered the concept of liminal spaces – transitional spaces or places that sit, rather fuzzily, between two different states, spaces or places. Since then, I have become rather fascinated by the concept of limnality, especially where this exists between one state or space that is very familiar and another that is largely, or even wholly, unknown. It’s a concept that I leaned on when writing my poem It Is Time (which should appear on this site in the not-too-distant future, as long as I am able to navigate the liminal space that is wedged between now and then…). So it was not that surprising that when I was looking for a new audiobook to listen to on my way to and from work, Liminal Thinking pushed its way to the head of the queue.

Unfortunately, my ‘reading’ of Liminal Thinking was something of a disappointment.

First, I don’t think Gray’s book is really about limnality at all. Instead, I think it’s a book about how bias creeps into the development of a personal world-view, and how being aware of this can help us to challenge our instinctive thoughts to develop a more robust and accurate set of beliefs. I’m inclined to think that the introduction of the word ‘liminal’ into the title of the book was primarily a case of the author trying to find a distinctive ‘buzzword’ in the hope that it might catch on and become associated with him in similar fashion to ‘atomic’ (Atomic Habits by James Clear) and ‘tiny’ (Tiny Habits by B.J.Fogg). But perhaps that my natural tendency towards cynicism coming into play…

Secondly, my experience listening to this audiobook reinforced a feeling that has been growing inside me for a while now, namely that it doesn’t really work to listen to certain kinds of non-fiction and hope to get much out of the experience. I am thinking here of books that are in any way a bit how to-ish in character. This is because unless you are prepared to be constantly stopping to bookmark segments or to rewind to listen again so as to catch details fully, it’s just not possible to come away from the listening experience with anything tangible (such as some kind of notes), and with no physical, print version available either, there is then nothing to refer back to later on. Still, if nothing else, this does mean that Liminal Thinking taught me one good lesson: that I’m not going to waste my time listening to this kind of book any more.

My experience with Liminal Thinking wasn’t entirely negative. Gray does a nice job of succinctly capturing six ‘principles of beliefs’, namely that:

  • beliefs are models
  • beliefs are created
  • beliefs create a shared world
  • beliefs create blindspots
  • beliefs defend themselves
  • beliefs are tied to identity

These principles are designed to highlight how the things we believe are not necessarily true reflections of reality but are, instead, built on thoughts that we have, mostly automatically, as we process our interactions with the world around us through our unique, personal, and mostly unconscious, set of biases and filters (things like ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘spotlighting’). Gray argues that with the right practice, it is possible to develop the ability to challenge one’s beliefs, and modify the way that we respond to inputs, so that what we come to believe about the world is a more accurate, or at least more reliable, model of our reality. He does this by introducing a number of so-called ‘liminal thinking practices’. These are:

  • assume that you are not objective
  • empty your cup
  • create safe space
  • triangulate and validate
  • ask questions, make connections
  • disrupt routines
  • act as if in the here and now
  • make sense with stories
  • evolve yourself

Most of these practices are pretty much self-explanatory, but if you asked me to explain what it means to ’empty your cup’ (in this context) I’m afraid that I would fail the task… You see, I have developed a belief that when it comes to trying to retain the knowledge and ideas conveyed in non-fiction writing, listening to an audiobook doesn’t work, and that means that whatever ’empty you cup’ is referring to went in one ear and out of the other. What’s more, I am pretty much convinced that no amount of questioning, safe space, routine disruption, story-telling or personal evolution is going to change my mind…