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 ants are busy too
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Hello Reader, A while back, I sat down with my daughter and recorded a conversation about what she's learned from me. Not the frameworks. Not the acronyms. I wanted to know what actually made it through. Two things stay with me from that conversation. The first is that somewhere in it, I credited a line to Oscar Wilde that belongs to Thoreau: "It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?" She didn't care who said it. The question landed anyway, which tells you something about good questions. The second is that nothing she named came from a system. What gets passed on isn't the planner or the app or the perfectly themed week. It's the way you are with your time while someone is watching. Nobody inherits your counted hours. They inherit how you filled them. So here's the question I'd hand you this week, parent or not, teacher or not: if someone who watches you closely was asked what they've learned from you, what do you hope they'd say? And does the way you spent yesterday point there? That's not a productivity question. That's the whole point. – Mike P.S. If you want to sit with that question, write your answer down somewhere. More on that next week. |
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, 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...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 34 | October 24th, 2026 Hello Reader, Last week I wrote about watching the Foo Fighters play for three hours, and how nobody in that stadium was counting. I’ve kept thinking about what was powering that set. It wasn’t a schedule. It wasn’t a quota. Whatever kept them going that long came from somewhere deeper than discipline. That question sent me back to the name of this newsletter. When I told you why I called it The Lantern, I talked about carried...
Hello Reader, A line came to me out of the blue last week, after a couple of days that asked more of me than usual: Soft days make for hard landings. Hard days make for soft landings. By "landing" I don't mean the end of the day. I mean the moment something hard shows up. Days that test you are rehearsal. When the next test arrives, you've been somewhere like it before, and the impact gets absorbed. A long run of easy days leaves you out of practice, and the same challenge hits like a drop...