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.
One regulation before fall
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Hello Reader, Most of the rules you live by were never chosen. They arrived with a job, a family, a version of you from years ago, and they've been running quietly ever since. Some still serve you. Some just have seniority. And here's the trouble with rules, even the good ones: a rule is a switch. On or off, kept or broken. Miss the 6 AM workout once and the day feels cracked. Miss it twice and the streak dies, and the practice usually dies with it. Rules fail loudly, and they take things with them when they go. A regulation works differently. A regulation is a thermostat. It reads conditions and adjusts while still holding the temperature. "I write at 9 AM" is a rule, and one sideways morning can end it. "I write before I open email" is a regulation. Same intent, same structure, room to breathe. A late start doesn't break anything. It just adjusts the day. There's a seasonal reason to care about this now. September doesn't ease in. It lands all at once, and every rigid rule you're carrying is going to get pressure-tested by it anyway. New schedules, new commitments. The rules will snap on September's terms unless you convert them on yours. So that's the invitation: one regulation before fall. Pick a single rule that's been running you, the kind that only counts if it happens a certain way, and rewrite the command as a condition. Then live with it for the rest of August and let it bend when the week does. By the time things speed up, you'll have something that holds without breaking, which is the only kind of structure worth bringing into a busy season. If you want help choosing yours, yesterday's Lyceum covered exactly this, and The Regulation Book that goes with it is free alongside the replay at mikevardy.com/lyceum. See you later, P.S. About next month's book: there's something happening alongside it, too. Details when they're ready. For now, the only assignment is the regulation. |
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...