I’m Mike Vardy, and I help people build a better relationship with time — not by controlling it, but by working with it. Through my writing, courses, and community, I explore how intention and attention shape a more meaningful life — one rooted in the original idea of productiveness over productivity.
After years, it's finished
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Hello Reader, I'll tell you something I don't usually lead with. I've spent a good part of this year building the launch for my next book with AI sitting beside me for most of it — drafting, sorting, thinking out loud. And somewhere in that stretch I caught myself doing the exact thing I warn other people about. I was moving fast. Producing. The output was real and the pace felt great. Then one afternoon I looked at a pile of finished work and realized a good portion of it answered questions nobody had asked: polished, efficient, and aimed at the wrong thing. AI hadn't led me there. It had just made it very easy to get there quickly. I mention it because it would be dishonest to talk about productiveness as though I've solved it. I haven't. The pull toward speed is strong even for someone who's built a body of work arguing against it. What's changed is that I catch it sooner now. I've learned to stop and ask whether the thing I'm rushing to finish is the thing worth finishing at all. That question is the spine of the book I've been building toward. It's called Productiveness, and after a long stretch of revisions, it's finally done. We're in launch mode now, heading toward this Fall. I'm not going to crowd your inbox with it between now and then. Instead, I've set up one place to follow along. If you want in, that's all it takes: Follow the launch at mikevardy.com/booklaunch No noise. Just updates for the people who want them, and nothing for the people who don't. The book took years. The urge to rush it never once made it better. — Mike P.S. Speaking of doing the wrong things faster: my Grand Productivity colleague Garland Coulson (Captain Time) is teaching a session on exactly that tomorrow — Tuesday, July 14 at 1 PM PT. Five common AI mistakes and how to stop making them. Click here to register. |
The Practice of Productiveness
I’m Mike Vardy, and I help people build a better relationship with time — not by controlling it, but by working with it. Through my writing, courses, and community, I explore how intention and attention shape a more meaningful life — one rooted in the original idea of productiveness over productivity.
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue I20 | July 11, 2026 Hello Reader, I've been carrying something around since Craft & Commerce, and it's time I handed it to you. I caught James Clear describing how to hold two timeframes at once. Here's how he put it: "If you can find a way to never let a day pass without doing something that's going to pay off for you in a decade, you can end up in a really good spot. And usually it doesn't take 10 years — usually you only have to wait 2 or 3, and...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue I18 | June 27, 2026 Hello Reader, Today my neighbours to the south mark their independence. I'll leave the fireworks to them but the word has been turning over in my head, because independence isn't really a holiday. It's a relationship status. You're either free in a thing or you're captive to it. And there's one relationship almost all of us are quietly captive to. Our relationship with time. Look at how we treat it. We bargain with it. We try to...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue I18 | June 27, 2026 Hello Reader, A word has been following me around, and it keeps surfacing in places I don't expect. First it was Jerry Seinfeld, in a GQ video, holding up a Bic pen of all things. He called it quintessence — the quality of being perfectly, completely itself. A Bic pen can't be improved without being ruined. He was borrowing the idea from a small 1983 book that catalogued objects with that same quality: the Oreo, the Slinky, the brown...