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 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...
Hello Reader, Most of the rules you live by were never chosen. They arrived with a job, a family, a version of you from years ago, and they've been running quietly ever since. Some still serve you. Some just have seniority. And here's the trouble with rules, even the good ones: a rule is a switch. On or off, kept or broken. Miss the 6 AM workout once and the day feels cracked. Miss it twice and the streak dies, and the practice usually dies with it. Rules fail loudly, and they take things...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 24 | August 8, 2026 Hello Reader, In October 2020, I published a short piece on Medium called "Be a Goldfish." Two minutes to read, maybe less. The world was inside out that fall, and a new show about an American football coach coaching English football was making a lot of us feel better than we had any right to feel. There's a scene early on. A player can't shake a mistake he made mid-match. It's written all over him, play after play. Ted jogs over and...