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
|
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 22 | July 25, 2026 Hello Reader, My son turned a year older this week — a little deeper into his teens, a little closer to the door. The house has been quiet most of the month, the kids off living their own summer, my wife and I rattling around in the early draft of a life we'll be living full-time before long. So maybe it's no accident I've had an old Jim Croce song stuck in my head: Time in a Bottle. Croce wrote it in 1970, the night his wife told him...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue I21 | July 18, 2026 Hello Reader, You probably know the story. An American businessman is standing on a pier in a small coastal village when a fisherman pulls in with a few good fish. The businessman asks why he doesn't stay out longer and catch more. The fisherman says he has enough — enough for his family, with time left to sleep in, play with his kids, nap with his wife, and wander into the village at night to play guitar with his friends. The...
Hello Reader, I'll tell you something I don't usually lead with. I've spent a good part of this year building the launch for my next book with AI sitting beside me for most of it — drafting, sorting, thinking out loud. And somewhere in that stretch I caught myself doing the exact thing I warn other people about. I was moving fast. Producing. The output was real and the pace felt great. Then one afternoon I looked at a pile of finished work and realized a good portion of it answered questions...