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.
You didn't fall behind
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Hello Reader, I took two weeks off this summer. No livestream. Nothing humming along in the background. And when I sat back down, the first thing my brain offered me was a hole to dig out of. Then I caught the assumption underneath it. Falling behind means there was a race, and that I agreed to run it. I hadn't. I'd just stopped. Those are different things. One carries debt. The other doesn't. We collapse the two all the time. A vacation. An illness. A launch. A stretch where life mattered more than the system. Summer just makes it obvious because everyone's calendar goes soft at once. Here's the thing, though: the gap was never the problem. The re-entry is. We come back demanding that week one look like the week we left, and when it doesn't, we call that falling behind too. Tomorrow at 9 AM Pacific / 12 PM Eastern, I'm going live to work through this — what actually makes a return stick, and why a system you can come back to beats a system you never leave. If your summer has a gap in it somewhere (and whose doesn't?), come spend the hour with me. Watch live or catch the replay here. |
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...