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.
What do we do now?
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 wins. And in the last scene, with the crowd roaring outside, he pulls his campaign manager into a room and asks: "What do we do now?" The gaggle of reporters do their level best to enter the room and McKay asks the question again, now barely audible over the noise of the crowd. He gets swarmed and ultimately caught up in the crowd as they all leave the room, leaving it eerily empty... and the question unanswered. You can read that as a line about politics if you want. Plenty of people do, and plenty of them are doing it this week. But I don't think that's the real sting of it. McKay was productive. Every day of that campaign was optimized, scheduled, on message. He hit the goal. And the goal turned out to be a door with nothing behind it because he'd never asked what it was for. That's the difference I've been circling for years now. Productivity gets you the win. Productiveness is what answers the question after. Maybe you know the feeling. The launch that ships and leaves you flat. The kids back in school and the quiet you were craving somehow feels like a room you don't know what to do in. The project done, and then... what? If that's you right now, the fix isn't a better system for winning the next thing. It's deciding, on purpose, what winning is for before you start running. What's the "what do we do now?" you're sitting with? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one. See you later, P.S. That question is more or less why I wrote The Productiveness. The official launch is September 1, but it's quietly on Amazon now if you'd rather not wait. |
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 | September 5, 2026 Hello Reader, The calendar is dragging its feet this year. Labour Day always lands on the first Monday of September, and this year that Monday is the 7th. That is as late as it can possibly be. Summer got a two-day extension nobody asked for, and the long weekend that usually kicks off the "real" year is still sitting out there past this Saturday morning. Because let's be honest about what Labour Day actually is. January 1st gets...
Hello Reader, Picture a party, or a conference lobby, or the school pickup line. Someone extends a hand and asks, "Who are you?" Notice what they didn't ask. Nobody asks "What are you?" That question would land strangely, almost rudely. We save "what" for objects. A chair is a what. A person is a who. The grammar assumes there's a someone standing in front of you before there's a something, and it makes that assumption on your behalf every time. So far, so good. Being comes first, right there...
Hello Reader, Productiveness is out today. 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...