Time theming is a flexible approach to task management that I discovered through articles and books by Mike Vardy . I gave an introduction to time theming, and how I was planning to implement this in the previous post, Theming Experiment Part 1 and I didn’t make any changes to the process during this Tiny Experiment.

This post looks at the findings after running theming as a Tiny Experiment for 2 months. TL:DR I am keeping it.

I have my daily note open whenever I am at my computer, and often also on my phone. I have covered the setup and contents of the daily note in a previous post . I mentioned there that some of the content came from the weekly note, and the things I track feed back into the weekly note. This post looks at my weekly note - my main planning centre.

Tiny Experiments Overview

I got the inspiration for tiny experiments from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments . There is a lot more than just tiny experiments in the book, and I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

The appeal of a tiny experiment rather than a goal for me is that it comes from a place of curiosity - a “maybe” or a hypothesis. There is no failure in a tiny experiment. Only learning.

The basic format of a tiny experiment is distilled down to:
I will [action] for [duration].

The book refers to this as a pact.

Time blocking was my go-to method for getting through my to-dos when I was working. It served me well, but now that I am retired, have fewer small, separate pieces of work and more control over my day, it is feeling a bit too restrictive. I do still want some structure to my days, and I have a number of projects that I want to complete this year.

I have learned a lot from looking at other people’s working hardware and software, and I wish I’d started recording mine years ago. However, in the spirit of “the second best time to plant a tree…” this is my current hardware and software stack as of June 2026.