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 36 | November 7th, 2026 Hello Reader, I recently shared a line that came to me out of the blue. Then I caught myself on the phrase. Out of what blue? The sky, it turns out. The full version is “a bolt out of the blue,” and it means lightning from a clear sky, the one place you’d never expect it. Newspapers were using the long form by the 1860s, and by 1879 someone had clipped it to the three words we use now. The bolt fell away. The blue stayed. I like...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 35 | October 31st, 2026 Hello Reader, Happy Halloween. It’s the one night a year we invite fear in on purpose, dress it up, and hand it candy. Tonight, most clocks fall back an hour. Mine won’t. Where I live, the time stays put this year, which is new. So tomorrow the calendar turns to November while the clock on my wall carries on as if nothing changed. It feels like subjective and objective time colliding: the season says one thing, the clock says...
Hello Reader, In 1997, Elliott Smith put out an album called Either/Or. It's quiet and close, mostly one voice and a guitar, and for years I assumed the title was a mood. It wasn't. He borrowed it from a book, Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, from 1843. Kierkegaard's book is about two ways of living. One drifts from pleasure to pleasure and never commits to anything. The other chooses, and keeps choosing. His point was that the hard part isn't picking the right side. The hard part is choosing...