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January 29th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

✍️ Writing as Leverage

Writing is one of the few tools that can reliably change how you think. It forces you to commit to a line of thought and to turn half-formed ideas into something you can examine.

People who write regularly don’t just produce more and better work, they understand themselves and their work more clearly.

Regular writing also makes you better at explaining things, whether that’s in emails, presentations, or conversations. You develop an instinct for what works and what doesn’t when communicating complex ideas.

Plus, you create a record of your thinking that becomes valuable over time – patterns emerge, forgotten insights resurface, and you can see how your perspective has evolved.

But most people never get that leverage, because they treat writing as something that requires the right mood, the right idea, or the right moment.

If you want to write more, you need to design a writing practice that works with your actual life, not the idealized version where you have three uninterrupted hours and perfect clarity. Here are five principles to implement:

1. Decide what writing is doing for you. It might help you think through problems, build ideas in public, teach, or clarify what you actually believe. When you know what writing is supposed to do for you, you can stop judging each session by how good it feels and start judging it by whether it did its job.

2. Lower the bar until it’s impossible to avoid. Most writing habits fail because the minimum is too high. Instead, design a tiny experiment: “I will [action] for [duration].” Commit to a protocol that feels almost too easy: five sentences daily, one short piece weekly, 15 minutes on weekend mornings. This removes the daily negotiation about whether today is the right day.

3. Put writing on the calendar, not on the to-do list. When writing lives on a to-do list, it competes with all your other “someday” tasks. When it lives on your calendar, it becomes a rendez-vous with yourself and a ritual worth protecting. You just need to show up and write until the end of the calendar block.

4. Remember that first drafts are for thinking. Do the thinking before you optimize. First drafts are where you figure out what you think. You’re choosing what matters, what connects, and what you actually believe. That work can’t be outsourced. Use AI tools for research and refinement only after you’ve wrestled with the ideas on the page so you can call these ideas yours.

5. Close the loop every time. After you finish a piece, write one sentence about what you learned and one sentence about what you’ll change next time. This metacognitive practice can even be part of your weekly review and will help you iterate and improve your writing over time.

When you focus on consistency over quality, writing transforms from a thing you should do into a tool you actually use. You’re not trying to write beautifully under perfect conditions anymore. You’re just trying to write regularly under normal conditions.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put this edition’s ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to build a writing habit:

This trains your brain to notice opportunities for creative thinking and makes generating topics easier when it’s time to write longer pieces. Want to dig deeper into designing your own tiny experiments? Get your copy of the book​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

KATE MURPHY

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from journalist and bestselling author Kate Murphy, whose latest book Why We Click is out today.

1. One daily practice you can’t do without? Smiling at people. Extensive research shows that human beings have an instinct to sync or mirror one another. When you smile, people tend to reflexively smile back. The result is that you both experience a frisson of pleasure.

2. One strategy to restart my creative engine? Time to myself. While the human instinct to sync is adaptive in many ways, it can also make us lose touch with where we end and others begin. That’s why it’s important to have time alone to reclaim ourselves and recalibrate, particularly when it comes to developing unique and innovative ideas free from outside influence.

3. One mindset shift that transformed your work? Awareness of “bad apples” and how they can subtly chip away at our well-being and productivity. While not everyone has a great emotional vocabulary, everyone can relate to people who are “hard to be around” versus “easy to be around” and we subconsciously sync with not only others’ facial expressions, postures and gestures; but also, uncannily, their respiration, heart rates and hormonal activity.

Read Kate’s book

🛠️ Brain Picks

• Speak your thoughts, keep your privacy. Speakmac is offline dictation for Mac that actually works. No cloud uploads, no subscriptions, no nonsense – just native speech-to-text that feels like it's always been part of macOS. $19 once, yours forever.

• Reimagine community strategy for 2026. Join the free Circle Community Trends Live Workshop for three expert-led sessions to translate what’s evolving into clear decisions about where to invest, how to experiment, and what it really takes to build a community for the long run.

• Discover a fresh take on iPhone note-taking. Popt is private, fast and fun, yet packs more smarts than meets the eye. As you type, it quietly suggests tags for dates, contacts, places and even movies and TV shows. Just a tap and words become reminders, show up on a timeline, and tags are saved for films and places as your personal database. Free for early adopters: no sign-up, no ads, just Popt!

Many thanks to our sponsors for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.

🗓️ Events of the Week

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Explore writing as a tool for self-discovery. Join Gosia Fricze on Monday for a creative hour session where you’ll learn how writing can help you better understand yourself, uncover the stories shaping your thoughts and behaviors, and reconnect with your inner voice.
​• Heal through journaling. Join this workshop on Wednsday next week with bestselling author Tara Schuster to discover and practice expressive writing, the most researched journaling method for improving emotional and physical well-being.
​• Use AI to defend your focus and create bolder work In this interactive presentation, Adrian Avendano will teach you his method for treating AI as a co-partner for strategy or psychological feedback without that system slowly flattens judgment, taste, and original thinking.
​• Make progress on your project. Join Kathryn Ruge for a ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Host your own workshop (anytime!). Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.