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 well.

There's an older, fuller word sitting right next to it: productiveness. Not how much you produce. Whether what you produce, and how you go about producing it, actually amounts to something. Output versus orientation. The scoreboard versus the direction.

That distinction turned out to be big enough that I couldn't cover it in an email or an essay or a talk, though I've tried all three. So I wrote a book about it. Nine principles that make meaningful work sustainable. The Productivity Diet gave you a methodology; this one goes underneath the methodology, to the layer where the systems either hold or quietly fall apart.

It's the book I've been circling for fifteen years, and everything I've learned in that time is in it.

Get your copy at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

One more thing worth knowing: buy it any time between now and September 30th and you're a founding member of the Productiveness Year — nine months, nine principles, a chapter companion in your inbox each month. It's free with the book, and you can claim it on that same page.

Thanks for being here. Some of you have been reading me since the Productivityist days, which means you've watched this idea take about four different shapes before it found this one.

Today it's a book.

Mike

P.S. Tomorrow morning, 9 AM Pacific, I'm going live on YouTube to talk about it — the story behind the book, a short reading, your questions, and probably some visible relief. Join me here.