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.
I'm side-eyeing World Productivity Day
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Hello Reader, There's a day for everything now, and on June 20 it's World Productivity Day — a day I found myself thinking out loud about during this month's Lantern Lyceum. I'll admit I went looking for something poetic in the date. I assumed it landed near the solstice on purpose: longest day of the year, most daylight we get, a tidy little nudge to make the most of it. Turns out... no. As far as I can tell, nobody's even sure where the day came from. What is clear is what it's for: getting more done, working smarter, wringing more output from your hours. A fine thing to want — and also, let's be honest, exactly the thing that serves whoever would like more output from you. So forgive me for pushing back a little on the one day built to celebrate it. Here's the distinction I keep circling. Productivity has quietly become a business word — output, efficiency, throughput. Productiveness is something more human: doing what actually matters, on purpose. They sound identical. They aren't. That's the heart of TimeCrafting. And it's the whole reason the Trust exists. So here's my counter-offer to the whole idea of World Productivity Day: between now and June 20, your first month inside TimeCrafting Trust is just $1. After the 20th, that offer (which is for new members only) is gone. Click here to join us for $1 When the day itself rolls around, maybe the most productive thing any of us can do is forget productivity entirely — and lean all the way into productiveness. See you later, P.S. Between now and the 20th, hit reply and tell me what productiveness looks like for you. I read every email that comes my way. |
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, There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing your relationship with time and productivity could be better — calmer, more intentional, less of a daily scramble — but not having a place to actually work on it. That place is TimeCrafting Trust. And until June 20th (World Productivity Day) your first month is $1. Here's a sampling of what a dollar gets you for a full month: The Monthly Challenge, a shared focus to work through with the community Weekly Check-Ins...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 14 | May 30, 2026 Hello Reader, "May" is a permission word. Not just the month — the word itself. "May I?" "You may." It's a modal verb, one of those quiet grammatical structures that signals possibility and allowance. When you say "may," you're either asking for permission or granting it. Which means we've spent an entire month named after the concept of being permitted to do something. And most of us didn't notice. We hustled through May. We planned,...
Hello Reader, My daughter comes home from university tomorrow... for one month. Not the whole summer. One month. And one of those weeks, I'll be away at a conference. So the math is already doing what math does. There's a stat that floats around parenting circles — the kind that lands differently once your kid is actually gone. By the time a child leaves home, the percentage of lifetime time a parent has left with them is somewhere in the single digits. Not the teens. Single digits. I've been...