Tag: reflection

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.

The Hollow Man #poem

He does not signal his arrival with a knock upon the door.
I am not warned of his entry by footsteps sounding on the floor.
He is not accompanied by wraith-like wisps of mist.
Nor does he lean in close to give my cheeks a loving kiss.
There is no movement as he slides into the room.
I only realise he is present when overcome by gloom.

For he is a master of disguise,
sidling up to me, out of sight of prying eyes
until he has taken up his place,
occupying every single atom of my space,
matching every feature, to cast a shadow on my face.
He reshapes my breath to turn each exhalation into a sigh,
and cries tears upon my heart to dowse the flames
and cause the fire to die.

If I am sitting reading in a chair,
he squeezes in to look upon the words,
and twists their meanings
so that they transform, grotesquely and absurd.
If I am gazing from the window to catch sight of nature’s green,
he draws a veil across my eyes to wipe away life’s vibrant sheen.
If I am setting out upon a chosen path,
he conjures fog so thick and heavy that I cannot find the start.
If I have hopes to pursue a long-awaited plan,
he shows me every obstacle and challenge that he can.
He breaks the bridges of my imagination
so that they have insufficient span.
He was with me yesterday.
He is The Hollow Man.

He does not ask if it is convenient for him to share my time.
I have no say in this, the choice is his, not mine.
He does not consider for one moment
whether I would like him near,
for if he needs my space he takes it with no fear.
He gives no thought to any impact that he makes.
It’s up to him to choose the one he takes.

For he is a master of deceit,
and if he needs to feed then he will eat
until he has taken all he grips,
draining arteries with a thousand sips,
sucking out the marrow through his lips.
He gnaws away until my bones are stripped of meat,
and leaves the empty carcass in a heap.

When he is with me all I feel is rank despair.
I try to look ahead but only find a vacant stare.
When he is with me I can see no hope,
I cannot move as I would like, my walk becomes a slope.
When he is with me there is only cloud,
and I would even welcome then a deathly shroud.
When he is with me there is nothing you can say,
for I am empty till he moves away.
There is no weapon you can use to end his stay.
He is The Hollow Man,
and he will have his day.

Yet, he will tire, and then as softly as he came,
I find that he has slipped away to leave me with my fragile frame,
and if I search with care for what lies buried in the depths,
I find that he has not quite stripped me as I slept.
For there are embers that still burn though feebly bright,
that, tended gently, provide new warmth that brings a light.

For he is a master who will make his mark,
and from those tiny flames out jumps a spark,
until it catches on the dried-out skin,
taking hold to make new flames begin,
exploding with the hidden energy within,
then bursting outwards as a firework on its arc,
until the world no longer seems so dark.

There is no fanfare as he leaves his host,
he simply slips into the ether to become another haunting ghost.
There is no note to say farewell,
no threat that he’ll return to cast his spell.
But I expect that he’ll be back,
that he will claw his way inside once more
to turn my soul to black.
And strangely, though his visits cause much strain,
the gift he brings is worth the pain,
and even though I shudder at his name,
I know with certainty that he will come again.

He is the slaughterer –
the one who feeds upon the lamb.
He is the emptier –
the one who draws out all the poison
that has spread across the land.
He is The Hollow Man,
and I must welcome his arrival,
for he is part of who I am.

(c) Tim O’Hare, August 2023

THE HOLLOW MAN: I would say that I am usually in a fairly positive frame of mind, but every so often, and always without any real warning, I find that I have slipped into a deep state in which I have absolutely zero motivation and can see no point whatsoever in doing anything at all. I become uncommunicative, I mutter, I trudge. I know that I am in this state, but I am powerless to change things; in fact, in the moment, I don’t want to. The best way that I can describe how I feel is empty, or hollow. Over time, I have learned that this down phase passes, and usually I wake the next morning feeling back to normal, better even, than I did before the dip. My energy levels shoot back up, and I feel more inspired. ‘The Hollow Man’ was written on such a morning. After a terrible dip the previous day I had spent an hour or so reading, gone for a short run, and emerged from the shower with the first two lines of the poem in my head. As soon as I could I stood at my whiteboard, wrote out those two lines and then followed the seam to chip out the whole of the first verse. At that point I was thinking that I should stop, but I soon found myself at the computer typing in the first verse and then, over the next couple of hours, all of the rest of the poem tumbled out. At the outset, I had no idea that the poem would ultimately become uplifting (well I think it is uplifting!) and perhaps even a little profound.

Problem Shared #poem

A problem shared is a problem halved,
or so the saying goes.
But whether that is really true
is debatable I suppose.

My problem had been hidden deep inside
until you called it by its name.
And that was like the whistle,
blown to start the game.

The problem that was diagnosed
affected how I lived.
It stopped me getting on with things;
it made my brain a sieve.

This problem that you helped me with
is tricky to unpack,
It means my brain keeps worrying.
I never can relax.

The problem I am grappling with
is not a sickness I contracted.
Rather, it’s part of me,
so always I’m distracted.

The problem you explored with me
in many ways defies convention.
It’s not that I don’t want to,
I just can’t control my attention.

The problem that I shared with you
for years has had me troubled.
And to be honest, since you got involved
its size has more than doubled.

It isn’t that you didn’t help
because certainly you did.
It’s just that now I’m in the game
you’ve helped me lift the lid.

The problem that was inside me
has now come bursting out.
And now I want to dance and sing
and jump and scream and even shout!

My problem shared, it hasn’t halved,
or reduced in size at all.
But now we’ve torn down all the bricks
it’s no longer a wall.

So, although my problem may have multiplied
by three or four or five.
Truly, I give thanks
because you’ve helped me come alive.

(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023

About this poem: I was given a diagnosis of ADHD at the age of 56 in summer 2022 through a private provider called ‘Problem Shared’, and for about 9 months in late 2022 and the first half of 2023 I had roughly monthly online sessions with a prescribing nurse. These conversations were always very enjoyable (for both of us I think) and helped me to unpack some of the challenges I was experiencing and to express my thoughts and ideas on tackling those challenges, and on ADHD more generally. This poem was not intended to relate only to my interactions with the ‘Problem Shared’ organization, but I used the name as a starting point. It captures the idea that whilst my diagnosis, and subsequent treatment, has certainly generally the flow of my life a lot better, it has also opened up all kinds of additional issues and challenges.

Meditation 241022

I used to have a strong, more-or-less daily, journaling practice. This would usually take place as part of my morning routine and involved me writing out by hand into a notebook whatever thoughts were running through my head. This would typically take me around 30 minutes (although sometimes it would be a much longer session) and in the process I would work through issues that I was facing, collect fresh ideas and reflect on how I was progressing in life. I found it very useful practice – one of what I called my ‘Things That Help’ – but gradually I got a sense that my daily journaling session had become an impediment to me actually getting on with whatever it was I wanted to, or should have been, doing. I couldn’t escape the feeling that journaling had become a displacement activity that helped me to avoid getting on with the day. It was perhaps one part of what made me a Master Procrastinator.

A few months ago I made the bold (for me) decision to switch things around, moving away from writing by hand in favour of typed entries in my Obsidian-based Life-Management-System, and if that wasn’t enough I shifted the timing of my journaling sessions to mid-evening. In addition, based on countless recommendations that I had read telling me that it was a good idea to adopt a structured approach to writing journal entries, I picked a series of prompt questions (‘What went well today?’, ‘What could have gone better today?’, ‘What could I do differently?’ etc.) and then wrote responses to these based on the day that I had just experienced. After I made these changes things started quite well and I wrote entries on most week days for the best part of a couple of months, but after a while, and I can’t really believe that I am writing this, I found that all I could write in response to my second question, ‘What could have gone better today?’ was something along the lines of ‘well nothing really’. After a week or two of writing such entries I reached the conclusion that I was done with typing structured journal entries each evening and, in fact, I was done with the practice of journaling, full stop.

Walking home from work this evening, after having had a brief conversation about the value of journaling within an online community that I am a member of, I started to think again about whether there was any other way that I could incorporate something akin to journaling back into my life. Alongside this, I have been wanting for some time to try to get back into some kind of reasonably regular pattern of writing entries for this blog and so my brain threw the two tasks together and came up with the idea that I could (sort of) journal by writing (hopefully) regular (sort of) blog posts.

This is my first attempt – a blog post in which I reflect on some aspect of my life, some issue that I am grappling with, some idea that I have had or… well who knows? I certainly don’t. I don’t even know whether I will write any more such posts after this one – it seems like an interesting idea right now but I know what I am like and so I know that it is quite likely that things won’t turn out as I think they will. We will see I guess (or I will see at least, because I don’t know whether anyone will ever read this and turn my I into our we!)

There’s one final point I ought to acknowledge… that yes, it is just a little pretentious to call these entries and the section of the blog that they sit in ‘Meditations’ because I really cannot claim to be anywhere near as wise as the writer of the original ‘Meditations’, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But who knows? Marcus Aurelius wrote his daily journal entries for one person only – writing them was his personal process for keeping himself on track with the Stoic principles he held dear. He wasn’t trying to be profound or to instruct or inspire others, he was just working through his thoughts and reminding himself of important principles. So I will try to adopt the same principle – at least I will aim write for myself, to help myself navigate life’s challenges, and if along the way there is a reader, or even readers, who enjoy or find anything of interest in my writings then that’’ll just be a bonus!