When We Say "One More Week" | First Fellowship Session Today | Interview with Eli Susman ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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When We Say "One More Week" | First Fellowship Session Today | Interview with Eli Susman ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
October 1st, 2026
_A newsletter by_ Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Hi friends,
Thanks for your enthusiasm and all your questions about the Ness Labs Fellowship we just announced!
Our kickoff session will be in just one hour, so if you’ve been meaning to join* our founding cohort, now is the time :) And if you miss it, you can watch the recording and join future sessions.
It’s been a busy few months between running research projects and redesigning our community experience at Ness Labs, and this week I’d like to explore something a little uncomfortable I’ve noticed in myself: the tendency to keep saying that next month will be quieter.
Reflecting on this pattern has already made me turn down some opportunities and actively seek a slower pace for the rest of the year. I hope it inspires some reflection and experimentation in you as well.
And if you’d like to design a more intentional life over the next few months, I’d love to see you in the community, whether you decide to join as a Member or a Fellow.
Stay curious!
— Anne-Laure
*Already a Ness Labs member? Please upgrade to the Fellowship here instead so you’ll receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of your Membership.
This week I was in Slovakia for the first time, where I gave a keynote and met my local publisher.
We had a great conversation, and at one point we started talking about something almost everyone seems to say: “Next month will be less busy,” or “I just need to push through one more week.”
I realized I say this all the time. There’s always some reason why this particular month is unusually intense: a deadline, a trip, a launch. And somehow, the month after that always looks wonderfully empty until, of course, when that next month arrives, it usually isn’t.
The reason why we do this is a psychological phenomenon you could call the future-self fallacy. Studies show that we tend to imagine our future selves as having more time and capacity than we do today.
And when we look at the future, we see the empty spaces in the calendar, but not the requests, delays, problems and new commitments that will eventually fill them.
Another reason this fallacy is so prevalent is that it gives our stress a finite horizon. While “I have to live like this indefinitely” would be frightening, “I just need to make it until next Friday” feels manageable.
That’s how we end up turning chronic overload into a series of what we think are temporary sprints, and we keep borrowing from our future capacity. So how do we break the cycle?
1. Start treating exhaustion as a signal. We tend to treat exhaustion as an exception, assuming the problem is this particular month, rather than information we can use to take action. If you have been saying “just one more week” for six weeks, something about the system needs to change.
2. Plan for your real future self. Assume that next week you will have roughly the same energy, distractions and unexpected problems you have today, and leave room accordingly. Timeshielding is my favorite way to do this.
3. Stop postponing life itself. Rest, exercise, friends, reading, thinking… Do not get these things scheduled for the mythical quieter month ahead. Make space for the parts of your life that matter to you right now, whether that’s a good book, a long walk, or a coffee chat.
There will always be unusually busy periods, and sometimes we really do need to push through. But the most important thing we can do for our future self is not believe they will magically cope with more.
Try this week’s tiny experiment to plan for your real future self and not your idealized one:
I will [protect one block of unscheduled time every day] for [1 week].
This will help you create a little breathing room instead of planning every week at full capacity. Want to learn how to run tiny experiments in all areas of your life and work? Get your copy of Tiny Experiments.
ELI SUSMAN
Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from psychologist and yoga teacher Eli Susman, author of Micropractice, a science-backed method to find calm and clarity in seconds.
1. One daily practice you can’t do without? Self-compassionate touch: one hand on my heart, one on my belly, twenty seconds each morning before the world rushes in.
2. One mindset shift that transformed your work? For years, I assumed “real” well-being meant stepping away from life, but study after study show that informal practices woven into daily life are more strongly associated with well-being than practices reserved for formal sessions.
3. One anchor ritual to reconnect with yourself? Before I open my laptop, I run a ten-second experiment: one deep inhale through the nose, one longer exhale out the nose.
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• Anti-Networking comes to London. Most networking events optimize for volume: more intros, more conversations, more stimulation. Anti-Networking takes the opposite approach. Each event is designed to help you go deeper and walk away with one meaningful connection. The next one is in London on October 26th. RSVP here.
Many thanks to our sponsors and cross-promo partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.
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):
• Join the Fellowship kickoff session with Anne-Laure. Come with your areas of uncertainty, leave with a tiny experiment you can start running straight away. Our first session is today on October 1st.
**• Turn reflection into action.** In this session, Gosia Fricze will help you explore how reflection can become a catalyst for meaningful change and how to move beyond insight alone.
**• Build a strong mind.** In this virtual meetup, William Collins will help you run experiments around the way you think, and work with AI as it relates to a question that matters to you.
**• Discover micropractices for instant wellbeing.** In this Author Session, Eli Susman will teach you what the science shows about tiny, repeatable shifts and how seconds of breath, awareness, movement, or touch can tilt an ordinary moment toward calm and clarity.
**• Make progress on your projects.** Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday and Tuesday ‘body doubling’ coworking sessions to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones. Ethan Miller is also hosting a cowriting session on Sunday this week.
**• Improve your knowledge management system.** Join our next PKM meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
**• Host your own workshop.** 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.
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