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 wearing a set, switching channels to pick which stage they were listening to. Which meant that partway through my talk, I watched at least one person in front of me switch to somebody else. It was a bold format. I'm still not sure it worked. But it was a real experiment, and I came away thinking about how rarely we name the experiments we're already running.Patrick Rhone and I spent this month's PM Talks on that — including a distinction I think matters more than it sounds like it should. Experiments have an end in mind. Tinkering doesn't. One of them produces a decision; the other produces the feeling of progress without ever asking you to make one. We also got into Patrick's unrecorded podcast, which got him mocked by some fairly prominent people at the time and then quietly became the thing everybody does now.Six Discussion PointsMost of the choices you make in a day are experiments you never labelled as such — you're acting without knowing the outcome, which is the definition, whether or not you framed it that way.The difference between experimentation and tinkering is an endpoint: an experiment asks a question you intend to answer and then stop, while tinkering is perpetual adjustment that feels productive precisely because it never resolves.Parameters make an experiment possible rather than constraining it — knowing what you can't control is what tells you what's actually worth testing.You cannot predict which thing will land; after thirty years of writing online, the most-linked post of Patrick's career came from a car conversation with his wife and took twenty seconds to write.Coming home from a conference with pages of notes almost guarantees nothing happens — picking exactly three (one thing to act on, one person to connect with, one thing to think about) lets the rest fall away without festering.Stopping is itself an experiment: quitting something at its peak asks a real question about what you'd do with the time and how you'd fill the gap, and you genuinely don't know the answer going in.Three(ish) Connection PointsBetween us we promised rather more than three of these on air, so here they all are. Consider the overrun an experiment.Patrick Rhone — and his NOW page, which he swears he updates every couple of weeksTiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le CunffFish: a tap essay by Robin Sloan — the one he lost the source code to and rebuilt from scratchMicrosoft's Biggest Miss — Patrick's most-linked post, written in about twenty seconds, based on something his wife said in the carWhat You Bring Home — my piece on the three picks, which is where this conversation startedMy NOW pageThe poem Matt wrote about my talk — handed to me on orange card stock when I went back for my laptopThe three-picks idea came out of my own notebook after New York, and I wrote about it thinking it was a minor observation. It got more response than most things I publish, which rather proves the other half of this conversation — you don't get to choose what resonates. You only get to choose what you try. So: what have you been tinkering with that you could turn into an actual experiment, with an end date and a decision attached?

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.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 most personal conversation I've put on this feed in a long time: why productiveness is a state and not a rate, and why that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should; which of the nine principles I actually struggle with, and the reframe a therapist gave me years ago that changed how I measured a decade of my working life; why I've cut interviews on this show from fifty-two a year to twelve; and why, after eighteen years of doing this, I've never once described myself as a podcaster.It felt right to put this one out on International Podcast Day. Eighteen years, no breaks, and the thing I keep coming back to is that the show was never the point — it's the connective tissue between everything else.Six Discussion PointsProductiveness predates productivity as a word, and the substitution quietly swapped a state for a rate — which matters because a state is tethered to identity in a way a rate never is.Data can change your rate. It can't change your state — which is why measurement alone has never made anyone feel less behind."Is this the right app?" is almost never the first question; whether the work is aligned with your energy is, and most systems will never stop to ask it.A therapist's reframe — that you're a stay-at-home parent who happens to run a business, rather than a business owner who happens to be at home — leaves every fact unchanged and completely alters what success was ever supposed to look like.Cadence is the hardest principle to hold because the seasons of a life keep invalidating the rhythm that was working, and grace is what makes that survivable rather than damning.Legacy is built by the ride rather than designed at the end of it, and you don't get a vote in how it turns out — which is an argument for being more interested in the ride than the result.Three Connection PointsProductivenessThe Front Nine-era photo of Grace and ColtonGrace's ask: She's a psychology student looking for lab experience. If you're a teacher, psychologist or sociologist with room in your lab, get in touch and I'll pass it along.Grace has been around for this work her entire life — she wrote show notes for this show as a teenager for twenty dollars an episode, which she brought up on air and which I had genuinely forgotten. Getting to have this conversation with her, in a studio, in a city we were both in for completely different reasons, is about as good an illustration of the ride-over-the-result argument as I could have staged on purpose. I didn't stage it. That's rather the point.

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.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 — Zach — is a founder building Be Hard, a platform for structured personal challenges, and he's failed at more of these than he's completed, which makes him a more useful guide than someone with a perfect record. We got into why one challenge with one focus beats ten, how longer challenges force you across seasons and schedule changes in a way 30-day sprints don't, why "I forgot" is a more common failure cause than any lack of discipline, and why a challenge that looks indulgent from the outside can still be doing real work.Six Discussion PointsPrograms like 75 Hard succeed partly because they're honest about being hard, in a market that mostly competes on how easy something will be.Doing multiple challenges simultaneously is the most common way people fail — one challenge with one clear focus, even if it combines physical, social, and mental elements, is far more sustainable.Longer challenges force you across month boundaries, season changes, and disrupted schedules, which is exactly what reveals whether something actually fits your life.Most failures aren't about discipline — they're about a rescheduled task falling out of routine and simply being forgotten.A challenge should be designed around a specific problem you're trying to solve, which means the same activity can be a real challenge for one person and meaningless for another.Fitting a challenge into a full life usually requires removing something rather than finding time — but that removal has to be honest about what's actually optional.Three Connection PointsBe Hard — Zakhar's challenge platformConnect with Zakhar Azatian on LinkedInCheck out Mike's booksIf you've been circling a challenge you keep not starting, the useful question isn't whether you have the discipline. It's whether you've picked one thing instead of five, and whether you know what problem it's actually meant to solve. Get those right and the difficulty stops being the obstacle.