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's your novocaine?
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Hello Reader, In 1996, a band called Eels put out a song called "Novocaine for the Soul." The person singing it keeps saying everything is fine while asking, almost politely, for something to make it stop hurting. He doesn't want it fixed. He wants to stop feeling it. The song somehow found its way back into my head recently, and I've been thinking about it a lot – because I think we've gotten very good at making our own novocaine. Novocaine doesn't fix the tooth. It lets the work happen without you having to be there for it. You sit in the chair, the drill does its thing, and you walk out a little lopsided with no real sense of what just happened inside your own mouth. A lot of what passes for productivity works the same way. The cleared inbox. The checked-off list. The day packed so tight there's no gap for anything to seep through. None of it is bad on its own. But I've caught myself using it like an anesthetic, staying busy enough that I don't have to notice how I feel about the work or the people in it. Busy feels like fine. Fine feels like good. Then one day you realize you can't remember the last time a day actually landed. The first principle in Productiveness is Humanness, and it starts from a plain reminder: you are not a machine. A machine doesn't feel the drill. You do, and that isn't a flaw to engineer around. Friction means something in you is trying to get your attention. Fatigue is a signal. Even the silence between projects is data, because it shows you what you've been avoiding. I used to rush to fill that silence with email and noise. Some days I still do. Novocaine is easier than listening. So when I notice I'm reaching for the numbness, I've started asking a different question. Instead of "what's wrong with me?" I ask "what do I need right now, honestly?" Sometimes the answer is rest. Sometimes it's the hard conversation I've been scheduling around. Sometimes it's just to sit in the chair and feel the day for a minute. I don't have a tidy fix for this. I'm still in the chair myself some days, happy to take whatever dulls the edge. But I'll ask you the same thing I've been asking myself: What's your novocaine, and what is it keeping you from feeling? Reply and tell me. I read every email I get. – 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, If you read Saturday’s edition of The Lantern closely, you might have spotted two words in the middle of it that had no business being there: “Ad placeholder.” That was a note to myself. It marks where a sponsor message goes, and it was supposed to be gone before the issue went out. It wasn’t. So there it sat, right after the bit about Jeff Lynne sitting in the fog, and right before a paragraph that begins, “That’s the part of ‘out of the blue’ we tend to skip.” (I’ve since...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 36 | November 7th, 2026 Hello Reader, I recently shared a line that came to me out of the blue. Then I caught myself on the phrase. Out of what blue? The sky, it turns out. The full version is “a bolt out of the blue,” and it means lightning from a clear sky, the one place you’d never expect it. Newspapers were using the long form by the 1860s, and by 1879 someone had clipped it to the three words we use now. The bolt fell away. The blue stayed. I like...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 35 | October 31st, 2026 Hello Reader, Happy Halloween. It’s the one night a year we invite fear in on purpose, dress it up, and hand it candy. Tonight, most clocks fall back an hour. Mine won’t. Where I live, the time stays put this year, which is new. So tomorrow the calendar turns to November while the clock on my wall carries on as if nothing changed. It feels like subjective and objective time colliding: the season says one thing, the clock says...