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.
Neither rhyme nor reason
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Hello Reader, There's an old story about Thomas More. A friend showed him a book he'd written, and More suggested he turn it into verse. The friend did. More looked it over and said something like, "Now it has rhyme. Before, it had neither rhyme nor reason." I can't say whether it happened exactly that way. But the phrase has lasted 500 years, and I have a guess about why. Rhyme is what feels right. Reason is what makes sense. More's joke works because we expect anything worth our time to have both. Most of us don't manage that. We lean one way. People who lean hard on logic end up in what I call the ruthless realm, where the calendar stops guiding you and starts driving you. People who lean hard on feeling end up in the reckless realm, where they wait to feel it before they do it and chase every new spark along the way. In Productiveness, I write about a third place: the reasoned realm. In More's phrase, reason is one half of the pair. In mine, reason is where the two halves meet, where logic and feeling inform each other. "Reasoned" means shaped by reason, not ruled by it. There's another meaning of rhyme I keep coming back to. A rhyme is a pattern that returns. That's how the realms work, too. Nobody lives in the reasoned realm all the time. You drift into ruthless weeks and reckless nights. What helps is learning to recognize the rhyme. You notice that you've been here before and you know how this one feels, so you find your way back sooner. In the book, that noticing belongs to Prudence. So I wonder if the better question to ask about your life is whether it rhymes. Can you hear the patterns that keep returning, the ones that pull you off course and the ones that bring you back? I don't have a tidy answer here. I'm still listening for the rhymes in my own weeks. The question I've been sitting with is this one: In your best decisions, which came first, the rhyme or the reason? Reply and tell me. I read every email I get. – Mike |
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 33 | October 17th, 2026 Hello Reader, A few weeks ago I took my son to see the Foo Fighters in Vancouver. It was his first stadium rock show. It was also one of the best I've ever been to, and I've been to a few. They played for three hours. Three hours is a long time to do almost anything. We had seats, but some people didn't have that luxury, and they stood through the whole thing. If you'd told me beforehand the set would run that long, some part of...
Hello Reader, Last week I left you with a question: if someone who watches you closely was asked what they've learned from you, what would you hope they'd say? And I suggested you write your answer down somewhere. This is the somewhere. In September of 1858, Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Decided that one must love and work, and that's it." The next day: "Tired, didn't love, and didn't work." Two lines. A whole day, held honestly — the intention and the miss. Most journaling fails because...
Hello Reader, I’d been looking forward to VisionQuest for a long time, and the first two episodes didn’t disappoint. No spoilers here, but they left me with a realization I didn’t see coming. When you build for long enough, you can end up with a full record of what you did and no felt sense of what it was all for. All the parts, none of the thread. I noticed it in a small way this week. One idea for a story made me feel more alive than weeks of output had. The next day the feeling was still...