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.
Since I started drawing and painting back in April 2024 I have primarily worked with ink and watercolour paints, with my ‘go-to’ format being small, usually ~5cm square, pictures on some particular theme that I have chosen to explore for a few days. Producing pictures of that type has become my staple art activity, to the extent that I describe this as my ‘art practice’. However, I am constantly thinking about how I would like to explore different formats and work with different media. This especially happens when I visit an art exhibition, see works by other artists,and wonder what I could produce if I branched out a bit. The funny thing is that prior to my big shift into art in April 2024 I had actually begun to dabble with creating pictures with pastels (e.g. see my post Rediscovering The Artist Within) but I have not returned to pastels once since then.
Sometime back in May I must have been somewhere that brought me into contact with some charcoal drawings. I had a set of charcoal pencils sitting unopened in my art supplies box, and so I thought I would branch out a little and see what happened when I completed the drawing phase of a picture with charcoal, rather than adopting my usual approach of starting off with some faint pencil lines and then going all in with my black ink pen. I think I hoped that the different drawing texture might lead to me producing a more abstract picture. Then, after scribbling away with the charcoal pencil for a bit, I returned to the familiar territory of my watercolour paints to give my drawing some colour.
The result of my efforts is shown in the picture above – a charcoal -cribbles-with-watercolour painting of a row of what I refer to a ‘wall trees’, somewhere in the valley of the River Walkham, from a photo that I had taken on a walk there.
I’m not sure exactly what I think of this picture. It seems quite basic and simple – the trees sitting very much on top of the leafy backdrop and lacking much detail in their trunks and branches – and that simplicity pushes me towards thinking that the picture doesn’t quite work. But I also quite like the more impressionistic look – the rough lines suggesting the texture and structure of the stone wall, and the bright greens and particularly the yellows of the leaf canopy shouting out for attention. The picture has a naivety which I think gives it a certain charm. As I look at the picture, my eyes seem to be drawn in to explore what little detail there is, perhaps more so than happens when viewing one of my more detailed ink and watercolour pictures. Overall, I think that perhaps the switch in drawing medium was successful in helping me to present the view in a more abstract, suggestive manner than my normal ink-and-watercolour approach.
I’ve not had another go with charcoal pencils since I created this picture just over two months ago, but revisiting it now and writing this post has fired me up to spend some more time over the coming period to play around with different approaches and media a bit more. I wonder what will emerge!
Since I finished writing my children’s adventure story, Empedocles’ Children, earlier this year, I have been exploring the various avenues through which I might eventually get it published. By far the most likely is that I will end up self-publishing Empedocles’ Children as an eBook and print-on-demand paperback, largely because to get a book out into the world via a traditional publishing route you have to first be successful in gaining the interest of a Literary Agent and, by all accounts, the chances of that happening are pretty minimal… As a result, I am adopting the working assumption that the doors to traditional publishers will remain firmly closed to me, but that doesn’t mean that I am not going to give that route to publication a try, in fact I have already started, having worked my way through an online course from Jericho Writers called ‘How To Get A Literary Agent’. About a month ago, following the approach suggested in that course, I sent off ‘query letters’, accompanied by a one-page synopsis and whatever portion of the manuscript the agent requested querying authors to send (usually the first three chapters), to eight Literary Agents. My plan is to send off a further set of query letters to another group of eight agents sometime in September, and then complete a final set of eight submissions in November(ish). The logic of this staged approach to submissions is that it provides the opportunity to modify the submission made to the later groups of agents on the basis of any responses (or lack of responses) received from the earlier one.
But what has any of this got to do with Cornelia Funke’s children’s novel The Thief Lord? The answer is that one of the things Literary Agents generally ask is that authors liken their work to what are termed ‘comparative titles’ (or ‘comps’). This is supposed to be a good way of the author showing where their book fits into the market (and that they know where their book fits into the market), and so help the agent decide whether or not it might be the kind of book that they want to represent and think they can sell to a publisher. With this in mind, before I could finalize my submission package I had to try to come up with a few such comps. Since I don’t routinely read children’s fiction, I spent a long time perusing the shelves of the local bookstore, but this didn’t really help me much because it seems to me that almost all new children’s books now feature magic, witches and wizards, dragons and suchlike. I also decided that I should try to get into the habit of reading some children’s fiction, and so when I stumbled upon a copy of The Thief Lord in a charity shop, I grabbed the opportunity to read a title by one of the most successful writers for children of recent decades.
The story of The Thief Lord is set, rather randomly, in Venice, and follows two orphaned boys, Prosper and his younger brother Boniface who have travelled from Germany after escaping from the clutches of their rather severe aunt who only wants to adopt the younger Boniface. In Venice, the two boys fall in with a group of street children led by the super confident, and extremely talented ‘Thief Lord’, Scipio. The first half of the book sees Prosper and Boniface become steadily more drawn into the group and their schemes to steal items to sell on, often to a corrupt antique dealer Barbarossa. The story hangs together pretty well and I found it a fairly enjoyable read…
…but then in the second half of the story, everything turns a bit weird. The group of children, rather improbably end up being befriended by a woman, Ida Spavento, whose house they were trying to rob, and then the plot suddenly takes Prosper and Scipio to an island where they find a merry-go-round that magically changes the age of those who ride it. I won’t spoil the story by saying who rides it and the extent to which they become younger or older, suffice to say that two of the main characters undergo contrasting permanent transformations after the merry-go-round breaks, trapping them at their new ages. I found the whole of this section of the book to be rather random – as if Funke knew that she wanted (or needed) to put a surprise twist into the book but hadn’t really worked out how to embed it into the story that she was in the process of writing. However, I’m an almost-60-year-old adult and The Thief Lord clearly wasn’t written for someone like me. Perhaps younger readers like (or liked, The Thief Lord was published in 2002) stories that change tack quite radically partway through. Who knows?
Overall, I quite enjoyed reading The Thief Lord, but I didn’t find it particularly satisfying. Interestingly, according to the Wikipedia entry for the book, a review in Publishers Weekly ‘found fault with the pacing’, a comment which matches up well with my own feelings about the story. In the end, I wasn’t left much the wiser in terms of finding a comp for my own book, although there is some similarity in the way that our stories unfold as they go along rather than following some obvious up-front structure or plot. I think there is also some similarity in the way that the stories bring together a group of children with different backgrounds and attributes. But in most respects the two books are very different, not least because Funke’s book has been published, translated into different languages, turned into a film (albeit apparently not a good one) and sold many thousands of copies, whereas my book hasn’t been published, hasn’t been translated, hasn’t been turned into the film and hasn’t sold a single copy…
A slow start to the day, with plenty of time for my morning routine… at least half an hour for reading, lots of different books – some daily inspiration, a chapter of a long novel, a short story, some poetry, and a few pages from a science magazine, with a cup of black coffee (currently decaf) by my side, and frequent stops to record an idea or to note some words of wisdom I have spied.
Then, a dive into my Journal notebook (Moleskine, large, squared), with my zero-point-nine millimetre Pentel twist-grip propelling pencil in hand, scribbling away, as my thoughts coalesce through the words I write in a way I simply cannot understand.
At least two or three runs each week… Preferably, although not as often as I would like, out of the city, even though I rarely feel that I want to go and often set out wearing a frown, ideally working towards some future long-distance event that, despite crowding in on me horribly as it approaches, seems to be a necessary challenge, albeit one reluctantly thrown down.
Having enough money to keep buying books… titles I come across that interest and intrigue, for it seems that books are my favourite food and provide me with much of the sustenance that I need.
Not being hungry… so, yes, please do bring me that snack (real food of course, not a book!)
Remembering to drink water… because going without it is something for which I really seem to have a knack, until it is too late, my body dry, and my brain shrivelled to uselessness by its lack.
Knowing what is coming up… and having a plan for the hours and days ahead, even though I know I will not follow my intentions, will waste much of the day and become frustrated with myself. (It’ll be a complete disaster if I set off with no kind of schedule, instead.)
Getting outside into nature, trees, sky, clouds, and all the rest of it… especially when there are big views – it’s so much better for connecting with the world than a constant processed diet provided by The News.
Talking out my thoughts… (even if you do not really want to listen, as long as you nod every so often, and give a few prompts to keep me going, it will really help to boost my knowing and keep my ideas growing.)
Being the master of my own time and space… so that I can sort and sift my thoughts, move slowly through the day, and know where I am and where I am heading.
Working at my own pace… but also not having to make too many choices. Although I will always have an opinion – I admit that’s true – it is usually far better if you simply tell me what we’re going to do.
Encouragement and praise… just the right amount and I have to believe that it is sincere. Just like the ambrosia eaten by Gods it can be sweet and sticky, so getting this one right is really tricky.
What doesn’t help is…
Losing sight of the things that help, or forgetting that even though I am certain of their value, I will often have to force myself to do them, and that, with insufficient respect for myself, I will likely lack the courage to make sure that they happen Enough.
(c) Tim O’Hare, September 2023
THINGS THAT HELP: As I allude to in my note for The Hollow Man (and probably elsewhere) there are certain things I like to do each day or on a regular/routine basis that help me to maintain my level of functioning. I find that I can go for a few days without following my ‘morning routine’ but if I let things slip for any longer or fail to force myself out for a run or a walk in the countryside I start to unravel. Things That Help captures some of these activities and ingredients that keep me in balance and, most importantly, notes the need to keep them in sight and to keep pushing myself to do them. I’ve come to think that everyone should write out their own list of Things That Help and keep it in a prominent place as a reminder
It is time to banish thoughts of giving up, to be replaced by the comfort of giving in – acceptance rather than flight, to fold back the shutters, emerging from the dark of night – allowing in some light.
It is time to cease the role of the bully, forcing the fearful child within to be the man he thought he should. Instead, enfolding in a loving hug to draw out all he could have been. If only he had understood.
It is time to give the boy a chance, to give him space to play his part, to let him fall and graze his elbow – blood and gravel – even though tears may flow. He may be strong enough. How else will we know?
It is time to take those steps that cross the threshold of the door, to find that it was open all along – never locked – and behind it? The voice of the song oft heard, though always sounding slightly wrong.
It is time to push on through the fog, that cloak of damp that so confuses senses, seeking clearer skies, different colours, other forms to try on for size. Who knows how those choices may surprise?
It is time to give in, not to temptation, hopelessness or terror, but to follow the path to those imagined lands, shaping their form with my own hands. Finally, he understands.
(c) Tim O’Hare, August 2023
IT IS TIME: This poem came completely out of the blue, coalescing onto the page in less than an hour. It reflects a big decision made on the previous day – to signal that I must let go of a big role at work, to stop fighting with the thought that to do so was some kind of failure, and to just accept that I no longer have it within me to push and cajole or fight with myself anymore.
I like to try to spend a little time painting on as many days as I can, and for obvious reasons, the key to this is to keep my pictures small. One of my favourite formats seems to be 5cm square pictures painted in a fairly loose style, with not too much detail and a fairly limited colour palette. Each picture starts with a few pencil marks that serve as guide lines for the pen work, mostly outlining key features and providing various forms of shading. Once the ink has dried, which only takes a few seconds, I start to apply the watercolour paint, usually colouring the sky and any large blocks of vegetation first, before moving on to fill in any details. The whole process generally takes less than 30 minutes and my preference is to spend time of this as pretty much the first thing I do in the morning. When I completed my first small picture, I didn’t have any particular plans for further pictures on the same theme, but one picture led to another, and it seems that I end up producing these miniature watercolours as part of a series, first Dartmoor Scenes and then House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, and a series of slightly larger Mysterious Britain pictures. Most recently, returning closer to home, I completed this set of pictures showing various landmarks in our neighbouring county, Cornwall.
The pictures weren’t painted in this order, but the subjects of my Cornwall Landmarks series are (from top-left working across the rows and down the columns in the composite picture above) The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove, The Eden Project near St Austell, Bedruthan Steps, Men-An-Tol stone ring, St Michael’s Mount near Penzance, a classic coastal tin mine pumping station, the Minac Theatre, Tintagel Castle and Restormel Castle near Lostwithiel. If I had to choose favourites then I think I would go for the pictures of The Roundhouse Gallery, Bedruthan Steps and Restormel Castle, although I might well make different selections the next time I look at them!
As with each of my other miniature watercolour series, I plan to get some copies of the 3 x 3 composite picture printed as greetings cards to sell at some point, and I will probably try out some of them as individual framed versions too.
I guess the obvious question for me now is where I will go next with this kind of miniature watercolour picture. This morning I painted a view from a photograph I took last week while staying in Exmoor, and so I guess that it is likely that I will end up doing some more from that beautiful part of the world. But whether I will end up with enough for a full series, so that I can make another 3 x 3 composite, only time will tell!
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!
It was the morning of the fourth day of July, twenty twenty-three, and I was running, alone, on Ilkley Moor. I could not take the path that I had planned, for it was stolen from me by the grasp of ferns, and so, instead, I found another way to travel west – my route, like life, a path of unexpected turns.
As I drew level with a group of trees, planted in my mental map, I turned to head, almost a scramble, up the rock-strewn slope, until with the ground flattening all around, I came to a stone wall and followed a well-worn path that lay in its shadow, east, towards the radio mast. From there I knew my way, down the track they call the Keighley Road, with a view across the valley over Ilkley town that, like the passing of a life, would slip away too fast.
As I began my descent, his profile came into view, to my right, just off the track, though still some distance well ahead – a small, dark man, sitting, gazing directly across my path, chin resting on hands, elbows propped on knees, his head straining forwards as if to peer through time to seek some other space. He remained there as I closed, his features sharpening in my sight, and I was struck how, like so much else in life, his presence was incongruous. For this did not seem to be his place.
I expected him to move as I approached, if only to shift his pose, but he sat looking west across the track, across the moor – still. And as my eyes searched for detail in his form I saw that he was too small, about two-thirds the size of a man, and so dark, yet without colour.
My brain was screaming at me: ‘Something is not right here’, and I felt a heavy weight in the air around me. I continued on, towards the point beside the grey stone on which he sat. My heart was beating fast, preparing to meet another life, but on my arrival there was no-one there.
(c) Tim O’Hare, August 2023
AN ENCOUNTER ON ILKLEY MOOR: This poem tells the true story of an encounter that I had on a morning run while staying on Ilkley Moor for a week. There was a rock on the verge by the track that I ran along as I made my descent to our holiday let. As I came down the track towards it, I saw the figure of a small, dark man sitting there, just as I describe in the poem, and I instinctively felt that I was not able to recognise all that lay before me. Even now, many months later, I cannot let go of the fact that he was there and that, just for a few moments, either he or I was not in the right place.
The proximity of Dartmoor to our home in Plymouth generally means that it is our go-to place for weekend walks, so it is hardly surprising that my phone is full of photographs of Dartmoor landscapes. I’m a particular sucker for ‘big views’, but my attempts to capture these in photographs are always something of a let down. Looking with the naked eye, big views fill my visual space with rich detail, but on camera everything seems to shrink, recede and flatten, resulting in a rather distant picture that is dominated by sky, and especially foreground, that the brain somehow filters out of the live view. I expect that this phenomenon is well understood by photographers, and it probably even has a special name, but to me it is just known as ‘disappointment’. This is compounded by the difficulty that I face when I subsequently try to capture this same kind of open, expansive view in one of my paintings. The part of a photograph that I want to paint seems to be only a small component of the whole, and no amount of zooming in seems to really help.
On one recent trip to Dartmoor I was pondering this issue when it occurred to me that what I was seeing with my eyes was a little like the view I got when I used my thumbs and index fingers to create a rectangular, letterbox-like, frame and then looked through that frame as if looking through a window. Despite there being so much more that could be seen, my brain seemed simply to ignore that part of the view that would have outside this frame, whereas my phone camera played no such trick. I began to wonder whether the key to painting this kind of view was to change the size and shape of the picture, adopting a similar letterbox, or panoramic, format. So, for a few days I played with this approach. The results are a series of four small painting that I refer to as my Dartmoor Panorama series.
I’m pleased with these pictures, at least to the extent that they better capture something approximating to the kinds of spacious views that I like best. Using a panoramic format does seem to work. In the third picture I was brave enough to include some people standing on one of the tors and gazing out at the view> I think this little piece of detail adds a lot to the picture, including a splash of contrasting colour. I was even more brave in the fourth picture, including a group of Dartmoor ponies. I tend to think that I’m not able to paint animals, but perhaps I am improving, because at least some of the ponies in this picture seem to have come out pretty well. I am particularly pleased with the grey pony in the foreground and the somewhat lively pony furthest to the right.
I feel sure that I will use this approach to painting expansive views again, and I suspect that at some point my curiosity will lead me to explore some photography guides to see whether I can find a proper explanation of my observation. It might have something to do with ‘foreshortening’ and/or ‘depth-of-field’ (words that I am vaguely familiar with that at least sound like they could be contributing factors). Who knows, perhaps someone reading this post will be able to point me in the right direction!
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 ExperimentsPACTs 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.
Tim O'Hare 