A Productive Conversation

My book, Productiveness, is now available. It's about the difference between doing more and doing what matters, and how we lost the ability to tell them apart. I'll send the release date the day it's set. Visit https://mikevardy.com/productiveness to learn more and get your copy today. I spoke at Podcast Movement in New York last month, and the whole conference ran on headphones — every attendee w...

My book, Productiveness, is now available. It's about the difference between doing more and doing what matters, and how we lost the ability to tell them apart. I'll send the release date the day it's set. Visit https://mikevardy.com/productiveness to learn more and get your copy today. We're at a forty-year low for trust across nearly every institution, and the reflex is to reach for something fas...

Normally I'm the one asking the questions. This time I wasn't. I was in New York for Podcast Movement , my daughter Grace came down from Montreal to meet me — partly for a concert, let's be honest — and since we were both sitting in a studio anyway, we turned the tables. She'd written her own questions. She hadn't read the book. I had no idea where any of it was going. What came out of it is the m...

I missed two Wednesday livestreams this month, and I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to decide whether that meant I'd fallen behind. Somewhere in there I realized I was asking the wrong question. Falling behind and stopping are not the same thing — they just feel the same and they get called the same name. Falling behind requires somebody waiting. There's a pace that was set, an agre...

The appeal of a hard challenge is that nobody's pretending it's easy. Most of what gets sold to us leads with how simple it'll be; programs like 75 Hard do the opposite, and that honesty is a large part of why they work. But the failure mode is predictable, and it's not laziness — it's taking on so many challenges at once that none of them survive contact with an ordinary week. Zakhar Azatian — Za...

Patrick's wife has an iPad mini she uses for exactly one thing: reading. She's never called it an iPad mini in her life. She calls it her Kindle — and she isn't confused, she's being precise. The name follows the job, not the packaging. That's the second time in two months we've stumbled into how the words people choose quietly reveal what a thing is actually for. This month's PM Talks opens there...

Most people describe work stress as one undifferentiated thing: I'm stressed at work. Amy Leneker's research says there are actually five distinct kinds, and the one doing the most damage to working people isn't the one that shows up most often. It's the sudden kind — the unexpected thing that yanks you off whatever you'd planned to do — and it has a nasty habit of multiplying into all the others....

We treat retreats as something you earn — a reward that shows up once you've worked hard enough, long enough. I don't think that's right, and I think it's the exact reason most people never actually take one. A retreat isn't a break from the work. It's part of it. I had just wrapped a multi-day virtual retreat inside our TimeCrafting Trust community and was about to head into another one at a conf...

Most of us don't drift into quitting a job. Something happens — a single, identifiable moment — and that's when the relationship with our work actually changes. Anthony Klotz calls these moments "jolts," and once you have the word for it, you start seeing them everywhere: in your own career, in the people around you, in decisions you made years ago that you never quite had language for until now....

This month's PM Talks starts with a confession: I've had an epiphany, and I don't use that word lightly. Somewhere between an "aha, I get it now" moment and what I can only describe as a holy moment is a distinction most of us never bother making — and once you start looking for the difference, you start noticing which of your own realizations actually deserved the weight you gave them. Patrick Rh...

Logic is beautiful and it's also almost never enough. That's the tension running through this entire conversation — the idea that we want our decisions to be purely logical because it's simple and concrete, but almost no real situation in a human life actually has the structure logic requires. I've believed for a long time that reason lives somewhere in the nuanced middle between logic and emotion...

There's a two-word sentence that's been sitting with me since I finished this book, and I haven't been able to shake it: life is. Not life is hard, not life is good, not life is anything — just life is. Gary John Bishop makes the case that the moment you add a descriptor to that sentence, you're not describing life anymore, you're arguing with it. Gary is the author of Unfuck Yourself and his newe...

Inbox zero was never about the number. That's the part almost everybody forgets. When Merlin Mann coined the term in the early 2000s, "zero" wasn't a count of unread messages — it was the amount of mental space your inbox occupied. Somewhere along the way, we turned a philosophy about protecting attention into a scoreboard, and the guilt machine that followed is the reason so many of us feel like...

We tend to treat procrastination like a willpower leak — something we could plug if we just tried harder, planned better, or bought the right system. Robin J Emdon makes the case that we've been aiming at the wrong target entirely. Procrastination isn't a discipline failure; it's an emotional one. It's a survival instinct doing exactly what it was built to do, which is why "try harder" so rarely w...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . Patrick Rhone joins me again for the latest installment of our monthly PM Talks series, and this month we landed on a word that does a lot more heavy lifting than most...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . We tend to treat sleep like the thing we'll get to once everything else is handled — the line item we trim first when life speeds back up. But sleep isn't the reward fo...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . Most of us have convinced ourselves that the problem is effort. We're not working hard enough, moving fast enough, or checking enough boxes. But what if the real proble...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . Most of the conversation around focus starts in the wrong place. We talk about distraction as if it's the problem — the notifications, the open tabs, the interruptions...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . We spend a lot of time talking about how to do more. What we talk about far less — and what might matter far more — is the question of how to pace yourself while you do...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . Most productivity conversations start with systems, tools, and tactics. This one starts with something more fundamental: the quiet principles sitting right beneath the...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . There's a loop most of us know well, even if we've never named it: feel behind, find the thing that's going to fix everything, go all in for a few weeks, get derailed b...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . This episode marks the latest installment in PM Talks, the monthly series I do with my longtime collaborator Patrick Rhone. We've been doing this for a few years now —...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . There is a difference between confidence and bravado, and most people have never really had to find out which one they actually carry. Confidence — real confidence — is...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . Most of us have been told that success is about mindset — stay positive, visualize the outcome, trust the process. But what if that advice is quietly working against yo...

This episode is brought to you by Your Clockwise Week—a personalized weekly structure built around your actual life, not an ideal one. If your week feels full but not fitting, you can learn more at mikevardy.com/yourclockwiseweek . The word "intentional" has been hollowed out. It's on coffee mugs, in Instagram bios, and attached to productivity advice that treats it like a personality trait rather...