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.
Roll the dice
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Hello Reader, I released a conversation yesterday with Jon Acuff about procrastination—and one idea kept surfacing: It’s not laziness. It’s friction. Sometimes that friction looks like overwhelm. Sometimes it looks like fear. And sometimes… it’s just not knowing what to do next. If you want to dig into that, you can listen here. But below is something simple you can try right away. Write down six tasks. Roll a die. Do the one it lands on. It sounds almost too simple—but it works because it removes the weight of choosing. No optimizing. No second-guessing. Just movement. And once you’re moving, procrastination has a much harder time sticking around. Try it once today. (No re-rolls.) |
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, We tend to believe that doing more will get us where we want to go. More effort. More output. More improvement.But that belief rarely gets questioned.What does get overlooked is this: What are we choosing to care about in the first place?That’s what I’ll be exploring in a live conversation with Mark Manson. You likely know Mark from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F-ck. His work has reached millions by challenging the idea that we need to fix everything—and instead asking us to...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 4 | March 21, 2026 Hello Reader, I spent part of this past Tuesday in a state of flow. The kind where you look up and realize hours have passed and something meaningful has moved forward. In my case, it was podcast work—episodes reviewed, refined, and pushed ahead. By the time I stopped, I’d carried things nearly to the end of June. On paper, that’s a win. But in practice, it gave me pause. Because while I was doing important work, I wasn’t doing the...
Hello Reader, One of the ideas that stuck with me years ago from Getting Things Done by David Allen is simple: if something goes on your calendar, it’s a commitment. Not a suggestion. Not a possibility. A commitment. That’s why GTD (David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology) encourages us to reserve the calendar primarily for appointments — things that must happen at a specific time. Most tasks belong somewhere else. But over the years I’ve noticed something about the handful of things I...