Hello Reader, A few weeks ago my daughter Grace sat me down in a studio in New York and asked me questions about Productiveness that nobody else has asked. That conversation has become the most-watched thing on my YouTube channel in months. It also made something hard to ignore. I've been slack on YouTube. For a long while, the only thing happening there was a Wednesday livestream. That changes tomorrow. Starting Friday, October 2, there's a new video on the channel every Friday at 8 AM...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, When I started writing Productiveness, I knew what it wouldn't be. It wouldn't have exercises in every chapter. It wouldn't hand the reader a system. It wouldn't end with a 30-day challenge or a downloadable worksheet. I said so on page fourteen, because I thought the reader deserved to know what kind of room they were walking into. The room is a quiet one. The book explores nine principles, humanness, grace, prudence, nuance, tolerance, efficacy, cadence, trust, and will, not...
4 days ago • 2 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 30 | September 26, 2026 Hello Reader, Lorne Michaels has a line I can't shake: "Fatigue is your friend." He wasn't talking about deadlines. In the documentary about writing SNL at night, he explains what he actually means. When you're depleted, the conscious mind (the careful one, the one protecting your reputation) clocks out. The unconscious takes over. You take bigger risks. You start to make yourself laugh. Read that again. Fatigue doesn't lower the...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, I’ve done a lot of talking about Productiveness this month. None of it went quite like this. My daughter Grace took over A Productive Conversation and interviewed me about the book. She didn’t ask the questions an author expects. She asked what she wanted to know: why I think productivity got corrupted, what changed in me while I was writing it, and what being productive looks like at home, not just at work. That last one landed. A while back, a therapist helped me flip how I...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, I got back from Podcast Movement this week with a notebook I can barely read. That's how conferences go. Three days of good sessions, better hallway conversations, and a running list of things I absolutely need to try. By the flight home the list has fourteen items on it and every one of them felt urgent when I wrote it down. Here's what I've learned the hard way about that notebook: it is not progress. It feels like progress, which is worse. Capture is the cheapest part of the...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Fall arrives today. Just after five this afternoon on the west coast, the sun crosses the equator heading south, and the season changes while most of us are answering one last email. We call it the equinox, from the Latin for equal night, and here's the part that surprised me when I learned it: the equinox isn't actually the day when light and dark come out even. That day has its own name, the equilux, and it falls a few days off depending on your latitude. The equinox is a...
11 days ago • 1 min read
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 29 | September 19, 2026 Hello Reader, This is the last Saturday of summer in the northern hemisphere. That's not a mood, it's astronomy. Fall arrives Tuesday at a few minutes past five in the afternoon here on the west coast. The equinox is precise like that, down to the minute. The season won't linger for a long weekend or wait for a ceremony. It will cross a line in the sky while most of us are mid-errand, and by dinner the light will belong to...
14 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, On Tuesday I wrote about the Spheres of Attention, and I said the deepest one (Concentration) is where the real work happens. What I didn't say is how to get in. The doorway showed up for me in the most ordinary place: email. When I teach people how to handle their inbox, the first shift has nothing to do with folders or filters. It's this. Stop going in with questions. Start going in with missions. A question sounds like "What's in here?" or "Did anything come in?" Ask it and...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Fair warning: this one runs longer than usual. I'm sending it anyway, because it might be the most pressing and directly actionable thing I can put in your inbox right now. Here's the situation. News is everywhere. On your phone, in your inbox, threaded through every feed you open. The hard part was never finding information. The hard part is deciding what deserves your focus, because everything arriving on your screen was built to feel like it does. Media companies aren't just...
18 days ago • 2 min read