It is no secret that I am a fan of tiny habits — I have taught my flagship course Tiny Marketing Actions over 15 times and fall more in love with it each cohort.

The reason I love tiny habits so much is it takes an overwhelming goal like “double your revenue” or “learn to speak French” or “save enough to have a stable retirement” and breaks it down into simple, feasible steps that are easy to execute each day.

Despite the efficacy of using tiny habits to reach goals more quickly and effectively, there has always been an undercurrent of “use habit science to hack our way into being a super human worker” which is not something that I nor many people I work with aspire to be.

What we crave is creative flow, mental and physical well-being, financial stability and meaningful, significant impact.

Enter Tiny Experiments

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s new book Tiny Experiments gripped me from the first time I picked it up last week. I became so obsessed with it that I took it with me into the pool, and bought the audio book to accompany me on my morning and evening walks.

It connects significant work and life frameworks and is a simple concrete guide to activate my definition of success from Body of Work which is to “enjoy my life while I am living it.”

Finding a way to observe my thinking and learning process to create flow in all areas of life always felt overwhelming. I couldn’t see blocking out hours for morning pages or extensive journaling.

Which why I was so excited to read about this metacognition tool in the book, called Plus/Minus/Next.

Plus/Minus/Next

​Plus/Minus/Next is Anne-Laure’s weekly journaling tool that she describes like this:
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At this point, most people know about the benefits of journaling. Read any self-development blog and you will stumble on at least one article telling you why keeping a journal will change your life.
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The problem? Most people can’t build the habit. We know we should keep a journal. But we don’t know how to keep a journal. I have tried most of the journaling methods out there—one line a day, free writing, doodling, the bullet journal—and none worked for me. None of them felt goal-oriented enough, and some of them required too much work.
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So I made my own journaling method. It’s dead simple, it may not work for everyone, but it’s perfect for me and I’ve managed to stick with it. I call it “plus minus next” journaling—and it does what it says on the tin.

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Here is the nutshell:
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This method can work with whichever medium you prefer, but since I’m a big fan of handwriting, let’s pretend you have a notebook. Open your notebook, write the date at the top of a page, and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked, “–” for what didn’t go so well, and “→” for what you plan to do next. This is what it should look like:

Plus Minus Next Model from Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

With this simple habit of reflection, you get an integrated view of what is working in your life that you have gratitude for (awesome clients! the song of birds in the morning! love notes from my daughter! conversations about neuroscience with my son!), the things that are not working (recurring subscriptions that are hard to cancel! project communication friction! not being able to fall asleep quickly at night! not making time for writing my book every day!) and next steps that are concrete ideas for getting things off the things that are not working list (consolidate all subscriptions to one credit card to make them easier to track and cancel! move my phone to the other room an hour before bedtime! have Brittany write SOPs for standard project deadlines for communication protocols! hard wire writing blocks in my calendar!).

I am so excited to start my Plus/Minus/Next reflection this Sunday and continue it weekly to gain insight and make progress on my mental and emotional wellbeing.

Read about the whole method here. Join Ann-Laure’s newsletter here and grab the book here.
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My professional crush Ann Handley has some serious competition with Ann-Laure but that’s ok — I collect awesome people as a hobby and I have all the space in the world for a large collection.