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.
Don't let July just end
|
Hello Reader, Most months don't end. They get interrupted by the next one. We sprint through the last few days, or we ignore them entirely. Then Monday shows up wearing a new month's name and we wonder why nothing feels different. A month deserves a close. Not a ceremony. A close. Ten minutes and three questions will do it. What actually moved this month? Not what kept you busy. Busy and moved are different ledgers. Name one or two things that are genuinely further along than they were on July 1st. That's the month's real record, and it's almost always better than the noise in your head suggests. What did you tolerate in July that August shouldn't inherit? A commitment that went stale. A tool that fights you. A yes that should have been a no. You don't have to fix it today. You just have to name it, because whatever goes unnamed gets carried forward by default. What deserves your first hour on Monday? Not the whole week. The first hour. August 3rd will arrive holding an inbox and a dozen small demands, all of them happy to decide your morning for you. Deciding now is how you open a month on purpose instead of on defence. That's it. Nothing to download, nothing to buy. Just ten minutes on Thursday so Friday can close July properly. See you in August. – Mike P.S. To everyone who signed in, searched "Vardy," and voted for my Podcast Movement session: thank you. "The Podcast Isn't the Point" made the program because of you. I'll share more details on what else this could mean for me in NYC soon. |
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.
Hello Reader, Productivity makes a quiet promise: anything can be moved with enough effort. Break it down, schedule it, show up consistently, and it yields. Most of the time the promise even holds. But everyone is carrying at least one thing it can't touch. A relationship that went silent. A version of yourself that didn't happen. A chapter that closed without your signature at the bottom. A wish that things were different, standing right beside the knowledge that they won't be. There's no...
Hello Reader, There's a line in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that gets passed around like folk wisdom: If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working? It comes out of Tuco's mouth. That matters more than the line itself. Tuco is a bandit. He spends the entire film scheming, running, getting double-crossed, walking across a desert, and coming within an inch of being hanged more than once. Nobody works harder in that movie. Nobody suffers more for what he's chasing. He just...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 27 | September 5, 2026 Hello Reader, The calendar is dragging its feet this year. Labour Day always lands on the first Monday of September, and this year that Monday is the 7th. That is as late as it can possibly be. Summer got a two-day extension nobody asked for, and the long weekend that usually kicks off the "real" year is still sitting out there past this Saturday morning. Because let's be honest about what Labour Day actually is. January 1st gets...