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, Productiveness is out today. I've spent most of my working life inside the word "productivity." I've taught it, built frameworks around it, made a career of it. And for years, something about the word itself has chafed. Productivity is a factory measurement. Output over input. It was designed for machines, and somewhere along the way we started applying it to people, and then to ourselves, and then we wondered why our days felt mechanical even when they were technically going...
Hello Reader, Tomorrow, Productiveness comes out. You'll hear about that tomorrow. Today I want to talk about how I got here, because the path has been showing up in odd places lately and I think I owe you an explanation. If you've been reading me for a while you know my previous book, The Productivity Diet. It worked. It still works. I use what it shared every day and I'll keep sharing and teaching it. Nothing about tomorrow replaces it. But look at what I've been posting lately. Poems on...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 27 | August 29, 2026 Hello Reader, There's a scene in Tony, the new Anthony Bourdain film, that I can't shake. He's getting his photo taken for a book jacket, restless, moving too much for the camera, and he tells the photographer: "It's okay if it's blurry — it's how you see time." It might be invented. Script lines usually are. It's also true, which is the only test that matters. Think about what a sharp photograph actually is: a slice of time,...