Tag: atomic habits

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.

Atomic Habits – James Clear #reading

The second book that I finished reading in 2025 was ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. I had previously listened to the audiobook version almost immediately after it was released in 2018 but I picked it up again because it was selected as the January title for an online book club that I am a member of within The Timecrafting Trust (Mike Vardy). I will admit that, as much as anything, this time round my interest in Atomic Habits was focused on why it has occupied the bestseller lists for pretty much the entire period of its existence, selling an astonishing 15 million copies in the process (the irony of the fact that I have contributed two of those sales over the years was not lost on me!).

As the subtitle suggests, Atomic Habits positions itself as a guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones. It certainly does start off with a strong focus on (daily) habits, but as I worked my way through the text I soon found myself thinking that it wasn’t really about habits, rather it was simply about how to get things done.

Early in the book I found myself railing against Clear’s argument that habits are such powerful things because they act like compound interest – if you adopt a daily habit to become 1% better in some respect then the power of that habit compounds each day. Clear suggests that if you get 1 percent better each day for one year then you will end up 37 times better by the time you are done and implies that such improvements in personal performance or skill can be achieved by repeatedly performing a 1% better habit each day (note: 37 times better, not 37% better – I checked the maths!). But this is surely not true. A habit that makes you 1% better on the first day continues to make you 1% better than you originally were on the second and subsequent days, but to get better and better (i.e. to grow or compound the percentage improvement) I think you would have to change your activity on each successive day. I accept that there might well be some additional gain to be had by repeating the same habit each day, but not to the extent suggested by the comparison with compound interest. For example, if you adopt a habit of running a mile each day then you will certainly get fitter over an extended period of time than if you just go for the run once, but after a while you will find that your fitness has reached a plateau and to gain further improvement you will have to start running two miles each day etc. In my opinion, if you have to constantly change what you are doing then you are not developing a habit, you are just carrying out an ongoing programme of self-improvement! [I suppose it could be argued that the habit is then repeatedly showing up to complete that ever-changing activity.]

Setting aside my reservations about whether the book is really about habits or, as I think, about setting up your life so that you are more likely to get things done in general, where Atomic Habits succeeds is in distilling the ideas covered into a very simple set of four principles or laws. Each of these laws is matched to one of the stages associated with taking action: cue, craving, response and reward. Clear states these laws as follows:

  • make it obvious
  • make it attractive
  • make it easy
  • make it satisfying

I think it is hard to argue with this framework. Clear considers each of these laws in some detail offering various suggestions to help in each case, but I think that much of this material is not that necessary because the four laws do most of the heavy-lifting on their own.

Put simply: if you want to increase the chances that you will perform a task or activity then you need to make it more obvious and/or more attractive and/or easier and/or more satisfying. Similarly, to combat a bad or unwanted habit, you need to make the cue that triggers it less visible and make the habit itself less attractive and/or more difficult to do and/or less satisfying. I think it is this simplicity of the core message in Atomic Habits that is the secret of its success and its astonishing sales figures. It’s a message that is obviously right (or at least feels obviously right), easy to remember and also easy to make use of.
Job done.