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 scoreboard problem
Hello Reader, At some point, our days started keeping score. Steps counted. Streaks maintained. Tasks completed, inbox emptied, boxes ticked. Every evening now ends with a quiet tally, and every tally files the day into one of two columns: won or lost. Most of us couldn't tell you when we agreed to this. We just woke up one day already playing. Here's the trouble with the scoreboard: it can only measure what happened. It has no column for what mattered. So it's entirely possible to win the day and lose the point. Anyone who has ever cleared their whole list and felt strangely empty at the end of it knows exactly what I mean. The score was perfect. The day was hollow. And the scoreboard had no idea. The reverse is true too, and this is the part worth keeping. Some of your best days would have scored terribly. The afternoon that disappeared into one hard conversation that needed to happen. The morning you got three sentences right instead of thirty things done. The scoreboard calls those losses. You know better. So here's a small trade to try this week. When the day ends, skip the tally. Ask a different question instead: Did today point where I'm headed? Not how much moved, but whether it moved in the direction of anything. Some days the honest answer is no, and that's fine. That answer teaches you something a streak never will. The score tells you what you did. The direction tells you who you're becoming. Only one of those survives the week. Talk soon, P.S. Something I've been building for years arrives next Tuesday. On Thursday, I'll tell you the whole story. |
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.
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 28 | September 12, 2026 Hello Reader, There's a movie I keep coming back to called About Time. The premise is simple and strange: the men in one family can travel back within their own lives and revisit days they've already lived. Most people remember it as a romance, and it is one. But the heart of the film is a father and a son. The dad's advice to Tim is to live each ordinary day twice. The first pass comes with all the tension and worry that keeps...
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...