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.
Momentum isn't speed
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Hello Reader, Somewhere along the line, momentum became another word for speed. Get moving, pick up the pace, don't lose it. Physics never agreed to that. Momentum is mass times velocity. Two things, multiplied. Speed is only half the equation. The other half is weight: how much you're actually moving. This is the season of velocity plans. August arrives, fall comes into view, and the instinct is to get fast. Earlier mornings, tighter days. But a velocity plan with nothing behind it behaves exactly the way physics says it will. Lots of motion, and it stops the first time something pushes back. A single off day shouldn't be able to end a plan. It can only do that when the plan has no mass. Mass is the part nobody schedules. It's the weight of what you're moving: work that matters to you and would still matter a year from now. Work you'd keep moving even if nobody was timing you. Move something like that slowly and you have real momentum. It's harder to start, and it's much harder to stop. So before you build the fast version of your fall, sit with one question: what am I moving? If the answer has weight, speed can wait. Move it a little today and a little tomorrow. By September you'll have something no burst of velocity can give you: a heavy thing, already in motion. See you later, P.S. I've written a new book. It arrives next month, and you'll hear about it here first. |
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, At some point, our days started keeping score. Steps counted. Streaks maintained. Tasks completed, inbox emptied, boxes ticked. Every evening now ends with a quiet tally, and every tally files the day into one of two columns: won or lost. Most of us couldn't tell you when we agreed to this. We just woke up one day already playing. Here's the trouble with the scoreboard: it can only measure what happened. It has no column for what mattered. So it's entirely possible to win the...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 26 | August 22, 2026 Hello Reader, Everyone I know is waiting for some version of the same thing. When the kids are back in school. When the project ships. When the inbox thins out, when the renovation wraps, when work calms down. Then the real routine starts. Then life resumes. I said a sentence out loud at a conference this summer and watched it travel farther than anything I'd actually prepared: the normal you're waiting for isn't coming back. People...
Hello Reader, Robert Redford would have turned 90 today. It's the first birthday since he died last September at Sundance, the place he built and never left. I keep coming back to a scene of his that has nothing to do with mountains. In The Candidate, he plays Bill McKay, a guy who runs for Senate mostly because he's told he can't win. So he says what he actually thinks. And then he starts climbing in the polls. So he says a little less of what he thinks. He gets slicker. He gets handled. He...