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.
Time Lives Everywhere
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Hello Reader, The latest monthly essay I write for Medium — The Sound of Time — started as a small reflection on why vinyl feels better than streaming. But beneath the surface, it became something else: a meditation on how time behaves when we stop trying to control it. Then there’s this week’s episode of A Productive Conversation with James Kimmel Jr. — an episode we recorded months ago that finally drops in audio format today. (Want to watch the full, unedited video interview? Here you go.) On the surface, our conversation was about The Science of Revenge. But listen closely, and you’ll hear time there too. Revenge is a kind of looping—an attempt to replay the past until it bends to our will. Vinyl and vengeance couldn’t be more different, yet both reveal how deeply time lives in everything we touch, think, or feel. When you start to look for it, you find it everywhere—spinning beneath a needle, lingering in memory, waiting in silence. See you later, P.S. What’s been replaying in your life lately—something you’re ready to flip to the next side of? |
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, Thanks to the TimeCrafting Trust Book Club, I’ve been spending time with Meditations again. Not reading it straight through, but returning to it—letting certain passages meet me where I am, rather than trying to extract something from it all at once. Three ideas have stayed with me. These three ideas don’t feel new. In fact, they feel familiar in a way that’s almost unsettling—like they’ve been quietly shaping how I think and work long before I could name them clearly. You don’t...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 5 | March 28, 2026 Hello Reader, There are moments when procrastination doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels… reasonable. A pause. A pivot. A moment to gather thoughts before beginning. In those moments, it’s subtle. Almost supportive. It creates space. And sometimes, that space is useful. It allows for reflection. It introduces just enough tension to sharpen attention. A form of eustress—pressure that prepares rather than overwhelms. But left...
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. That's it. It sounds almost too simple—but it works...