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 shift I've been circling...
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Hello Reader, Tomorrow, Productiveness comes out. You'll hear about that tomorrow. Today I want to talk about how I got here, because the path has been showing up in odd places lately and I think I owe you an explanation. If you've been reading me for a while you know my previous book, The Productivity Diet. It worked. It still works. I use what it shared every day and I'll keep sharing and teaching it. Nothing about tomorrow replaces it. But look at what I've been posting lately. Poems on Instagram. Analogies pulled from ordinary life. The last issue of The Lantern was about how time gets blurry, and it was more metaphor than method. A few years ago I'd have felt guilty sending something like that to a list of people who came for systems. Now it feels like the most useful thing I can send. I've been walking toward this for years. If I'm honest, I've also been ignoring it, because the practical stuff is easier to sell and easier to defend. Nobody argues with a checklist. Plenty of people argue with a poem. Here's the distinction I keep coming back to. Productivity is about output. How much, how fast. Productiveness is about doing what matters, on purpose. One is the how. The other is the why. The Productivity Diet was always meant to serve the second one; I just spent a long time talking mostly about the first. The reason for the shift is simple. The how is everywhere now. You can get a system from anyone, and most of them are fine. What's rarer is someone asking whether the thing you're doing is worth doing at all. That question doesn't fit in a template. It fits in a story, or a line of verse that sits with you on the bus. So that's where I've been going. A poem doesn't tell you what to do. It makes you notice something you already half knew. That's what I want the work to do now. Make you notice, and then trust you to decide. I don't think the two are in conflict. You need the how once you know the why. But the order matters, and I had it backwards in public for longer than I'd like to admit. Which brings me back to tomorrow. Productiveness is the first thing I've written that puts the why first, start to finish. It isn't a book of hacks. Some readers will find that frustrating. I hope more of you find it a relief. Tomorrow's email will have the details. Today's has the reason. If any of this lands, reply and tell me what you've been circling without naming it. I read every one... and I write back. See you later, P.S. If you've already picked up a copy, thank you. That means more than I can fit in a P.S. If you haven't, it's right here. |
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 27 | August 29, 2026 Hello Reader, There's a scene in Tony, the new Anthony Bourdain film, that I can't shake. He's getting his photo taken for a book jacket, restless, moving too much for the camera, and he tells the photographer: "It's okay if it's blurry — it's how you see time." It might be invented. Script lines usually are. It's also true, which is the only test that matters. Think about what a sharp photograph actually is: a slice of time,...
Hello Reader, 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...
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...