TimeCrafting in Nature with Mike Vardy Part 1 (of 2)
“Productivity is a lifestyle. The journey is not done yet.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM mike vardy
Mike Vardy is a writer, productivity strategist, and the founder of Productivityist. He is the author of The Front Nine: How to Start the Year You Want Anytime You Want, The Productivityist Playbook, and TimeCrafting: A Better Way to Get the Right Things Done. He’s served as the Managing Editor at Lifehack, and written for 99u, Lifehacker, SUCCESS Magazine, and more. He has also spoken at all over North America at events like TEDx Victoria, South by Southwest Interactive, and CreativeLIVE, and hosts the Productivityist Podcast.
why productivity isn’t productivity
“So the reason I start off with that is a lot of people feel that productivity is about efficiency, and effectiveness and all these and getting things done as quickly as you can. And, and that is not what it is. Productivity goes deeper than that. I'm a big believer that productivity is about intention plus attention, it's the combination of those two qualities. What do you intend to do? And then how are you going to pay attention to it? Often what happens is we have one of those two things going on, but not both of them in tandem. So you're gonna have all the intentions to write a book, or to get in shape, etc. But if you don't have a way to pay attention to that, you're not going to get it done, which means you're not being productive.
Conversely, we often have the ability where we pay attention to a whole wide variety of things. But if it's not our intention to pay attention to those things, like email, or social media, or something that someone else has kind of put in front of us that's shiny and new. But it was never our intention to look at that or give that our attention, you're also not being productive. So if you do those things really quickly and effectively, you're still not being productive. You have to have the marriage, the partnership of those two things, intention and attention working together.
ORIGINS OF PRODUCTIVITYist
And the reason the term productivity has came to be was I was on a podcast that I was hosting this a few years ago. My origins and productivity start from being an enthusiast. I was trying to become more productive in my comedy writing, in trying to be a better father, like trying to figure out a way to make all of these things work, including my day job, which was working at Costco Wholesale. So I was trying to find some harmony between all those things. And it led me to the path of you know, the Stephen Covey, the Tony Robbins Time of Your Life Program, the David Allen's all of those things. And ultimately, I went from being an enthusiast to a specialist. So I, I used all the stuff I learned and then started to specialize in that. So I learned about the Getting Things Done methodology I learned about the Eisenhower Matrix. I learned about all of these different tactics. And then ultimately, I became a strategist. Now I've gone from being someone who knows all of the things, or at least has a good idea about all the things, but I have my I now can manipulate them a bit. Now I have my own strategies.
And so ist was the was the end of every single one of those words. And so at one point, I said, out of nowhere, I think it was just an offhand remark, I guess I'm a productivityist. And it stuck. People started calling me that even though I've always kind of believed that anybody can be a productivityist. So it's kind of taken on a life of its own, you can kind of try to lead people to where you want them to go. But ultimately, once you put it out in the world, they kind of decide for you and so productivityist is me. And it's also the the philosophy and all of the teachings that I have taught, which is through my methodology known as TimeCrafting. But it's about being someone who is is enthusiastic and or specializing in to this point strategizing with regards to productivity. I've now become a bit more of a philosophic. That's why, you know, when I say intention, and attention, those are things that don't just come to you, unless you've immersed yourself in that space. And that's kind of where I'm at. I have been for quite a while, I've been studying this for well over a decade now. And it's just something that I'm really into and it helps a lot of people when you have someone that you can go to and trust and almost give you permission to explore these things in ways that work for you.”
the catalyst
“I think the catalyst was when I was working at Costco. I had to run two separate departments. I was running the food court area, where you can buy the soda and the hot dog. But I also ran the service deli, which is where you can buy the rotisserie chickens. Two completely opposite locations in the warehouse. One is at the front, one’s at the back. But also two different ways of operating. I mean, you wouldn't go to the food court and expect that the hotdogs would be there from three, four days ago, they would be fresh. So there was an urgency, it was very much a on demand impulse kind of buy, so it was very customer service oriented, it was very reactionary. Whereas the service deli, you would make things with the idea of them having a shelf life of anywhere from three to five days. But then you also had to mix of the rotisserie chicken. So there's a lot of things to balance. And I was trying to work on that at my job. Being the manager, I had three sets of bosses, but then I also have my employees that were that were my bosses because Costco treats our employees incredibly well. And you want to make sure that you maintain that. So I was trying to figure that out. Plus, I was fairly new to the city of Victoria.
I was dating, I had met my future wife, and I was trying to get to know my city, so I ended up joining a comedy troupe because I did that in high school. So I was trying to juggle all of these balls in the air. And I thought I need to have some some systems, some framework, some tactics in place. And that led me down the path and I remember distinctly having like a day planner with a multi-colored pen. I decided that if things were in blue, it was for the service deli. If they were red, it was for the food court. And so I would write things down in different colors. And then I had highlighters. And so if I highlighted something yellow, then it was the next thing I was going to work on. And if it was blue it was maybe for later and then what I would do is I would highlight yellow overtop of blue which return it green and vice versa. So if it was finally in green it meant it was done. So I started to develop these kind of little tricks and these little hacks.
making productivity a lifestyle
And that's when I started to study, What does this mean? How do I make this more of a lifestyle thing because productivity is the lifestyle thing. It should be a way of operating. We're always going to want to be productive in some way, shape, or form. Productivity is taking actions towards accomplishing a goal. There will always be a goal. Whether it's a goal of living a great life, whether it's the goal than in that book, in particular, it's the goal of making more money. That's what the business is trying to do. So I was trying to get all this stuff sorted. And that's when I started to really dive in. But I'm a very intense person when it comes to this stuff. So I got into it, and I got into it, like I started to really dig into it. And at that point in time, I was doing a lot more comedy. So I started to do some parody around productivity. I decided that I was going to play this character that was an eventual productivity expert. So it was all about attacking the life hacker kind of system, because there was a lot of what they call productivity porn on the internet. And through that I started a podcast and I had a blog. And then I interviewed people like Seth Godin, like David Allen. David Allen's people said, Hey, we'd like you to write for us legitimately, like, as a productivity person, because you're entertaining, you're satirizing this. And in order to do satire, or parody, you really need to know what you're talking about. And so I started to write for the Getting Things Done Times, and then all of a sudden Life Hack came along. I turned what I was doing in comedy, into what I actually ended up doing, I did not intend to be a “productivity expert”. But because of the way I approached it, it was the that was the natural path to go down.
There’s a graph that says what people think success look like and what it actually looks like, I'm definitely in that range of where the squiggles are all over the place and stuff because I didn't set out to become Mike Vardy, “The Productivityist,” I set out to become Mike Vardy, actor, writer, whatever, and it turned into this. Productivity is a lifestyle. The journey is not done yet. There's still so much more to do. And I'm growing as I do it and learning not just about productivity, but how people perceive it, and how they approach it. And then noticing any gaps that I have. Once you get so close to something, you sometimes don't see the blind spots, because you're so immersed in it, that you have to it's hard to go back to beginner's mind sometimes. And that's one of the things I'm working on is okay, how do I help people that have no idea they're there? They think productivity is productivity when it isn't. So I need to step back and go Okay, well, let me create some metaphors. Let me create some stories around it, which that is a gift I have from doing comedy and all that stuff. So I'm able to intertwine all this in a way that I get really excited about.”
TimeCRAFTING
“The term Timecrafting came from a conversation with my son. We're walking to school, and this is when my son was obsessed with Minecraft just obsessed with it. I didn't know a lot about Minecraft. And so I asked him about it. He said, “Well, you take basic things like dirt, and wood and all that stuff. And then you make you combine it with other things. And then you get something really good out of it that you can use.” And as we're walking, I'm thinking about it and how it relates to time. Timecrafting is like you take your calendar, right? The things that you know that you have appointments, your tasks, your to do list, and when you combine them and work them together. So again, the calendar is a form of attention, right? The To Do list is a form of intention, they both have elements of both in them. But when you combine them together, you can take things to the next level. And the idea behind the reason I call it crafting is it's something that is not it's not mechanical, it's not fabricated. So that means it's going to change, it's going to evolve. So if you're working at crafting it, knowing that there is no end to how you will do that, then it makes it opens up the door to break free of some of the constraints.
Timecrafting is a way of operating, that takes into account being human and takes nature into account. Human nature can change and it should change and it should mold but there's certain things that are commonality that are known. And once you have that framework in place, because frameworks foster freedom, then you can play with it. And then the constraints don't seem as as restrictive. They feel freeing to a degree. It's consistent effort. But in a way that takes into account that you're not a machine, but you're a human being.”
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE on your favorite platform for listening to podcasts.
Please rate the podcast and leave a review, and of course share it with any friends who are ready to discover the Nature Advantage!
.