Cover of Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

As a recovering workaholic, I’m always keen to find more sensible ways of conducting myself. Before my late 40s, I could set unrealistic goals, achieve them, and recover quickly from the inevitable exhaustion. Instead of being selective about which project to pursue, I would hurl myself like a loon at all of them. Now a reformed character, I was recently drawn to the tagline: “Forget the five-year plan: achieve your ambitions through tiny experiments.”

The book that accompanies the tagline is Tiny Experiments by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff. If you’re a fellow nerd, you might already know Anne-Laure through the Ness Labs community, described as a “mindful productivity school for knowledge workers”. She encourages us to adopt an experimental and curious mindset to establish what we really want to achieve, rather than pursuing what we think we should want.

Last month, I was fortunate to be among the 300 people accepted into an ephemeral Tiny Experiments community. Led by Anne-Laure, over four weeks we have been encouraged to design, perform, and reflect on our own experiments through the platform. With a clear framework and peer support, it’s so much easier to make a start. Other members are experimenting with painting, journalling, language learning, and dozens more.

My initial experiment was to capture my feelings about money for five consecutive days. This idea was prompted by a proposal I’ve recently submitted for a book on how to avoid outliving your money. One of the reasons we get into financial pickles is because it’s so difficult to make good long-term decisions. How do we know how we’ll feel or what we’ll want in 30 years’ time? Or even a year’s time, for that matter? My hypothesis was that my feelings would change, even over five days, depending on mood, events, and other factors. I was right. I veered from confident to fearful, during one afternoon. I’m now keen to understand more about the emotions that drive major financial decisions, especially in later life. Admittedly, this is a tiny sample size and a limited timeframe, but it’s already given me some ideas for the fieldwork I’ll conduct for the book.

For this week’s challenge, we were asked if we wanted to pause (take a break), persist (keep going), or pivot (change direction). I decided to pivot to writing a 250-word story for five consecutive days. Those stories will be based either on the feelings I captured in my previous experiment or new feelings (if anything exciting bubbles up). This pivot offers me the opportunity to dig deeper into those feelings and extract some insights that’ll feature in the book. I’d idly considered publishing the stories as blog posts, but almost immediately chickened out. Then a fellow Tiny Experimenter challenged me to do just that. Like many of us, I’m much better at upholding commitments to other people. So, challenge accepted. I’ll post my stories here from Monday – Friday.

I’m hoping these further tiny experiments will enrich the book and also give me additional insights into my own situation. But, I need to ensure those tiny experiments don’t turn into several big projects.

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