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 26 | August 22, 2026 Hello Reader, Everyone I know is waiting for some version of the same thing. When the kids are back in school. When the project ships. When the inbox thins out, when the renovation wraps, when work calms down. Then the real routine starts. Then life resumes. I said a sentence out loud at a conference this summer and watched it travel farther than anything I'd actually prepared: the normal you're waiting for isn't coming back. People...
Hello Reader, Robert Redford would have turned 90 today. It's the first birthday since he died last September at Sundance, the place he built and never left. I keep coming back to a scene of his that has nothing to do with mountains. In The Candidate, he plays Bill McKay, a guy who runs for Senate mostly because he's told he can't win. So he says what he actually thinks. And then he starts climbing in the polls. So he says a little less of what he thinks. He gets slicker. He gets handled. He...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 25 | August 15, 2026 Hello Reader, Tomorrow, a show called Lanterns arrives. And every Saturday, something called The Lantern arrives in your inbox. I figure that small collision is as good an excuse as I'll ever get to finally tell you why this newsletter has the name it has. Call it lighting my own lantern the night before theirs comes on. Some history first, because I've been waiting for this one a long time. Fifteen years ago there was a Green...