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.
Two lines a night
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Hello Reader, Last week I left you with a question: if someone who watches you closely was asked what they've learned from you, what would you hope they'd say? And I suggested you write your answer down somewhere. This is the somewhere. In September of 1858, Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Decided that one must love and work, and that's it." The next day: "Tired, didn't love, and didn't work." Two lines. A whole day, held honestly — the intention and the miss. Most journaling fails because it turns into a report. Word counts, streaks, apps that summarize your day back to you. A report exists to validate or excuse. A rhythm just notices. And you don't need an app for a rhythm. You need a pen. Any pen. So here's the whole practice, two sentences long.
Try it tonight. Tomorrow night too. The nights it feels pointless are usually the ones with something to say. And if you want to take the practice deeper — the prompts, the structure, the thinking behind a reflective practice that holds up — that's what The Journaling Course is for. At your own pace. No streaks to maintain. – Mike |
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, I’d been looking forward to VisionQuest for a long time, and the first two episodes didn’t disappoint. No spoilers here, but they left me with a realization I didn’t see coming. When you build for long enough, you can end up with a full record of what you did and no felt sense of what it was all for. All the parts, none of the thread. I noticed it in a small way this week. One idea for a story made me feel more alive than weeks of output had. The next day the feeling was still...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 32 | October 10th, 2026 Hello Reader, It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. Ours has always been a harvest holiday first, which is why it lands in early October, while the fields are still being cleared and the leaves haven’t finished turning. I’ve been thinking about what a harvest actually is. A farmer plants the seed, sure. But the farmer doesn’t make the rain, or the soil, or a season that happened to be kind this year instead of cruel. Most of...
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...