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 is the second in a series of solo livestreams I've been running, and it builds directly on last week's conversation about why busy isn't a badge — it's a blur. If busyness adds motion to the blur, intentional living is what clears it. What I'm walking through today is the operating system I use to do that: TimeCrafting. Not as a concept, but as something that actually runs your day-to-day life.

Six Discussion Points

• The word "intentional" has been so overused it's nearly meaningless — and reclaiming its operational definition is the first step toward building a life that reflects what you actually value.
• Most people oscillate between the Ruthless Realm (all output, no alignment) and the Reckless Realm (all ideas, no follow-through) — and TimeCrafting is the path back to the Reasoned Realm, where choices are anchored rather than accidental.
• Reason isn't logic and it isn't emotion — it lives in the middle, and it's harder to sustain precisely because it offers less of the certainty that binary thinking provides.
• Daily themes aren't a rigid schedule — they're a gravitational pull, a lens you apply to your day rather than a rule you enforce on it, and a theme day that honors 70% still builds the cadence that intentional living depends on.
• The most clarifying question you can ask at any decision point is: "Am I acting from intention or inertia?" — and the answer often reveals whether you're building momentum or simply filling time with motion.
• TimeCrafting isn't just for work — the most durable themes are universal ones (connection, attunement, exploration, stewardship) that apply equally to your personal and professional life, which means you don't have to shift modes when you leave your desk.

Three Connection Points

• Check out the YouTube channel
• The Productivity Diet — goes deeper into mindset, method, and mastery across the TimeCrafting approach
• Previous episode in this series: Busy Isn't a Badge — It's a Blur — the setup for everything covered here

Intentional living isn't something you install once and leave running in the background. It's something you return to — like a rhythm, like a practice. The question isn't whether you're productive. It's whether you're willing yourself toward the right things. That distinction is where TimeCrafting lives. And if this episode gave you even one question worth sitting with — whether it's "what day is it?" or "am I acting from intention or inertia?" — then it's already doing its job.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Dawna Ballard is a professor of organizational communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in chronemics — the study of time as it relates to human communication. Her book, Time by Design: How Communicating Slow Allows Us to Go Fast, draws on decades of field research across medical settings, child advocacy networks, and organizations of all kinds to make a case that's both counterintuitive and deeply practical: slowing down your communication is often the fastest thing you can do.

Six Discussion Points

• The distinction between time — the clocks, calendars, meetings, and appointments we design — and temporality — the natural rhythm of relationships, sleep, learning, and meaningful conversation — isn't just semantic. It's the lens through which everything else about productivity either clarifies or collapses.
• The Children's Advocacy Centers case study is one of the most compelling real-world arguments for slow design: agencies handling urgent child abuse cases discovered that pausing for regular 90-minute monthly meetings didn't cost them time — it gave them speed, trust, and accuracy across the entire system.
• The obsession with efficiency didn't emerge from wisdom. It came from factory capitalism, Frederick Taylor's time-and-motion studies, and the industrialist impulse to extract skill from workers and standardize it. For knowledge work, creative work, or relational work, it's simply the wrong operating system.
• Speed activates the nervous system the same way physical threats once did. When we treat every delay as a danger — a long line, a slow inbox, a stalled meeting — we stay in low-grade fight-or-flight. And that's not a state in which anyone does their best work.
• The return-to-office push isn't really a productivity argument. At its core, it's a trust issue dressed in the language of culture — and forcing people into physical spaces doesn't resolve the underlying misalignment between what organizations measure and what actually produces quality work.
• AI is most useful when it handles the quantity tasks — summarizing, simplifying, organizing — so that humans can stay focused on the quality work that requires genuine thought, relationship, and judgment. The key is knowing which is which.

Three Connection Points

1. Time by Design — Published by MIT Press, available wherever books are sold, including Kindle/Amazon. This is the kind of book you sit with, not sprint through.
2. Time Thieves documentary — Explores the Greek concepts of Kronos and Kairos through case studies from Japan, Germany, Italy, and the UK. A rare look at how different cultures experience the collision of time and temporality.
3. Are You Polychronic or Monochronic? — CBC Radio / The Current — This is the piece that put Dawna on my radar. It introduces her research on "time personalities" — the idea that chronic lateness or rigid punctuality often isn't a character flaw but a reflection of how someone is wired to experience time. A good entry point before diving into the book.

Dawna references a phrase the Navy SEALs use: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. She reaches for it deliberately. It isn't a rejection of speed — it's a reframe of how you earn it. If you've been treating speed as the destination rather than the evidence that something deeper is working, this conversation is worth more than one listen. And if you want to keep thinking about what it means to stop doing productive and start being productive, that's exactly what we'll keep exploring here.

Until next time, remember: stop doing productive, start being productive. See you later.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Because the thread running through everything we talked about — travel, family dynamics, technological change, self-judgment, and the way small kindnesses move through the world — turned out to be the same one: grace. Grace is also one of the principles at the heart of my upcoming book, Productiveness, which made this one feel especially fitting to sit with. If you've been wondering what that book is actually about, this episode gives you a meaningful glimpse.

Six Discussion Points:

• Grace starts with goodwill — not as a feeling, but as a practice. We dig into what it actually means to operate with grace day to day, and why it takes more intention than most people give it credit for.
• Travel is one of the best teachers of grace around. From adjusting to late dinner culture in Greece and Portugal to ordering a chicken by pointing at the ones still running around a yard in the Philippines, travel asks you to meet the unfamiliar with openness rather than resistance.
• Balancing everyone's needs on Patrick's Greece trip required grace in a very real, logistical way — from his daughter's Mamma Mia pilgrimage to his and his wife's 20th anniversary. The fact that everyone left feeling like the trip was complete says a lot about how that went.
• I share a real-time example of reacting instead of responding — a strongly-worded email, a refund request, and some after-the-fact digging that made me feel briefly foolish before I decided to give myself some grace about the whole thing.
• We get into grace and cancel culture, and the difference between holding someone accountable and refusing them any room to grow or change. It is okay to change your mind. In fact, it might be one of the most graceful things a person can do.
• Small acts of grace echo further than you think. Patrick's daughter writing thoughtful notes to the colleges she's declining. Paying for a stranger's coffee without mentioning it. You don't know what someone is carrying, which is exactly why grace doesn't need full information to operate.

Three Connection Points

• Patrick Rhone's website — the best place to start to find everything Patrick has going on.
• Productiveness — my upcoming book, where grace appears as one of its core principles.
• New to the show? I've been putting out solo episodes of A Productive Conversation as well — here's one right here. You can also find them in your podcast app of choice.

Patrick and I covered a lot of ground this month, and I think that's because grace is one of those ideas that shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Whether you're navigating a foreign dinner schedule, giving someone the benefit of the doubt, or just deciding not to beat yourself up over a to-do list that didn't get finished — grace is the practice underneath all of it. We'll be back next month for another round of PM Talks, and in the meantime, I hope this one gives you something worth sitting with.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Overwhelm isn’t new. It’s human. That idea sits at the heart of my conversation with Dr. Max McKeown—strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and author of SuperAdaptability: How to Transcend in an Age of Overwhelm. From the very start, Max challenges the notion that we’re living through a uniquely chaotic moment, arguing instead that overwhelm has always been part of the human condition.

What follows is a thoughtful, recursive conversation about loops, space, nuance, and the difference between doing productive things and actually living productively. We explore how humans adapt consciously, why systems need slack to function, and how upgrading the way we upgrade ourselves may be the most important skill we have.

Six Discussion Points

• Why the “age of overwhelm” isn’t temporary—and never really was
• The danger of confusing productivity with productiveness
• How loops shape our behavior whether we notice them or not
• Why space is essential for adaptation in systems, work, and life
• The role of nuance, humility, and reason in conscious change
• What it means to “upgrade your upgrade” through metaplasticity

Three Connection Points

• SuperAdaptability: How to Transcend in an Age of Overwhelm
• Max McKeown on LinkedIn
• Productiveness

This conversation is less about answers and more about awareness—about noticing the loops we’re already in and choosing how we engage with them. If you’ve ever felt busy but not better, productive but not present, this episode offers a different way to look at adaptation—and at yourself.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope, two of the most widely read books in the personal development space over the last decade. He's the host of the Solved podcast, where he and his research team do exhaustive, long-form deep dives on the ideas most podcasters treat like talking points. And he recently co-founded Purpose, an AI-powered platform designed to make personal growth coaching accessible at scale. Mark and I have a lot of shared territory in this conversation—and a few places where we push each other in productive directions.

Six Discussion Points

• The backwards law in action: why every message of "you need to improve" carries an implicit second message—that you're not enough as you are right now
• Why optimal is suboptimal—and how relentless optimization can make the quality of your actual life measurably worse, not better
• The two dimensions of productivity most advice ignores: hours worked is not the same as leverage, and until you separate them, no system will help you
• Why effort is a double-edged sword—it only creates meaningful output when it's aligned with something that actually matters to you, and it actively works against you when it isn't
• How language shapes whether an idea lands—why the same truth needs to be said differently at different moments in a person's life, and why that's not semantics, it's everything
• The question Mark poses before chasing any goal: do you actually want the costs? Not the highlights—the daily friction, the ongoing compromise, the downside of the dream

Three Connection Points

• Mark Manson's website and free twice-weekly newsletter
• The Solved podcast: Mark's long-form, research-heavy series on the ideas people say they've heard before but haven't actually examined
• Learn about Purpose, Mark's AI coaching and personal growth platform

Mark's most useful provocation in this conversation isn't the one with the sharpest edge. It's the quieter one: before you add another goal, another system, another layer of self-improvement, ask yourself whether you actually want to live with what it costs. Not the version of it that works. The version on the hard days. The answer to that question tells you more about whether you're chasing the right thing than any productivity metric ever will.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

In this episode, I'm thinking out loud with you about what I call intentional productivity — not productivity as a set of tips or tricks, but as a philosophy, a way of living. If you've been following my work for a while, you know where this leads. If you're new here, this is as good a place as any to start. It's also my way of setting the table for next week's conversation with Mark Manson, whose work on values and what actually matters in life is more aligned with this than you might expect.

Six Discussion Points

• Busy has always meant anxious or occupied with worry — we've just rebranded it as a virtue, and that rebranding has real costs to the quality of our output and our lives.
• Applying machine-era metrics to human beings is where productivity thinking goes most wrong: machines don't need rest, and they don't need meaning — you do.
• Attention without intention is aimless, and intention without attention is powerless; real productivity is the active link between the two.
• Most systems miss the most important variable: doing the right things at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons — that last piece is where meaning lives.
• Time crafting, as distinct from time management, implies ongoing creative direction rather than control — you don't stop crafting until your relationship with time is over.
• Three questions that cut through the noise every day: What is the most important thing I could do today? What would make today feel complete — not full, but complete? And what am I doing out of obligation versus intention?

Three Connection Points

• "Why Doing Nothing Might Be the Most Productive Thing You Can Do" (APC652): If rest still feels like a reward you have to earn rather than a part of the system, this episode is the companion piece.
• Stop Managing Time. Start Crafting It: The Medium post that started many readers on the TimeCrafting path — a clear, practical case for why managing time sets you up to fail, and what to do instead.
• The Productivity Diet: The book where I go deeper into horizontal theming, daily themes, and why a framework beats a schedule every time.

Intentional productivity doesn't look impressive from the outside. It's quiet. It compounds. It doesn't post about itself. The person doing deep, meaningful work often looks like they're doing less than the person who's always visibly occupied — and that's precisely the point. The real question isn't how much you got done today. It's whether what you did moved you closer to who you want to be and the life you want to live. That question is uncomfortable. It requires you to actually know what you value. But that's the work — not the app, not the system, not the morning routine. Start there.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Erin Coupe spent 25 years in the corporate world before she recognized that her carefully structured life had become a kind of comfortable numbness. Her book, I Can Fit That In: How Rituals Transform Your Life, begins with a provocation right on the cover — the word “routines” is crossed out and replaced with “rituals.” That single strikethrough tells you everything about what this conversation is about. We dig into why rituals and routines are not the same thing, how autopilot living quietly erodes the quality of your days, and what it actually means to steward your energy rather than manage your time.

Six Discussion Points

• Rituals vs. routines is not a semantic debate: Routines are repetitious rhythms you follow; rituals are repetitious rhythms you choose, because you know they’ll give something back to you. That distinction changes how you relate to your own schedule.
• Autopilot living is often comfortable enough to go undetected: The threshold between comfort and complacency is razor-thin, and Erin traces her own awakening to the moment she realized she wasn’t unhappy, she was simply numb.
• Inherited scripts are the hidden architecture of a life unlived: The beliefs instilled by family systems, school, and corporate culture don’t expire on their own; they require deliberate questioning before they’ll release their grip.
• Energy stewardship, not time management, is the real leverage point: Asking “do I have time for this?” keeps you trapped; asking “is this worth fitting in?” puts intention back in the driver’s seat.
• Intentional pauses are not passive — they are productive: Silence and stillness feel counterintuitive to high performers, but they are precisely where self-awareness gets built and better decisions get made.
• The luna moth is more than a book cover image: It carries a message: the caterpillar’s insatiable appetite mirrors our culture of endless striving, and the moth’s transformation is an invitation to live fully now, not at 65.

Three Connection Points

• Erin’s website
• Erin's book
• Erin's podcast

Rituals don’t require more time. They require more intention. What Erin Coupe is pointing at — and what this conversation keeps circling back to — is that the quality of your life is shaped less by your calendar and more by your relationship with yourself inside that calendar. The pause isn’t wasted time. It’s where the transformation starts. If this episode landed for you, spend some time with the question Erin puts front and center: not “do I have time for this?” but “is it worth fitting in?”

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

In this PM Talks episode, Patrick Rhone and I explore what it means to be human in a world that increasingly treats us like machines. From travel and perspective to curiosity, ego, and even the power of doing nothing, this conversation leans into something deeper than productivity—it leans into presence.

Six Discussion Points

•  The instinct to “fix” everything can distance us from our humanity 
•  Travel expands perspective by shifting us from transactional thinking to relational awareness 
•  Much of what feels urgent today will be forgotten—humanness lives beyond immediacy 
•  Curiosity is a distinctly human force that leads to better questions, not just better answers 
•  Not every problem requires intervention—sometimes the most human response is restraint 
•  Letting go of the need to be right (or have the last word) is a quiet but powerful act of maturity

Three Connection Points

• Productiveness
• Your Human-Size Life
• Shifting Vocabulary: How Changing Our Words Changes Our Work (ft. APC Episode 637 w/ Erik Fisher)

If there’s a thread running through this conversation, it’s this: being human isn’t about doing more—it’s about knowing when to step back. When we loosen our grip on control, we create space for curiosity, perspective, and even wonder. And in that space, we don’t just get more done—we begin to understand what’s worth doing at all.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

Carla Ondrasik spent twenty years in the competitive world of music publishing — a world where trying, in her words, means dying. She's worked with artists at the highest levels of the industry, and she's spent the last two decades studying the psychology and neuroscience behind why we say we'll try and what it actually costs us. Her book, Stop Trying: The Life Transforming Power of Trying Less and Doing More, is one of those rare reads that reframes something so ordinary and so deeply ingrained that you can't un-see it once it's been named. I know, because she caught me using the word in the middle of our conversation — while talking about her book. That's how deep this goes.

Six Discussion Points

• Trying is a mental activity, not a physical one. Carla makes a simple but devastating distinction: doing is a strong, determined action; trying is the loop you run in your head while the thing stays undone. The "try test" she walks through in the episode makes this viscerally clear in about thirty seconds.
• We use "try" to avoid accountability — and to avoid saying no. The word opens a door for excuses and blame before anything has even been attempted. Carla unpacks how trying functions as a social shield, letting us appear committed while quietly reserving the right to bail.
• Talking about what you're trying to do tricks your brain into feeling like you're doing it. The dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline hits from announcing your intentions are real — and they're why so many people are still "trying to write a book" five years later. Talking about it is stealing the reward your brain should only get from finishing it.
• Saying "no" clearly is kinder than saying "I'll try." People pleasing drives a huge portion of our try behavior, and it's one of the most corrosive patterns Carla covers. An honest no respects everyone's time and attention — including your own. The other person stops saving you a seat. You stop dreading the follow-up.
• Silence protects the doing. Carla wrote her entire book without telling most people. The reason is strategic, not secretive: outside opinions — even well-meaning ones — introduce doubt, friction, and the need to justify the work before it's done. Protecting your goals with silence is a way of keeping all the energy pointed in one direction.
• A no-try life starts small. Awareness comes first, then one small completion — the junk drawer, the bag of clothes you meant to donate. The neurochemical reward from finishing even a tiny thing creates the momentum to do the next one. This is how the pattern breaks.

Three Connection Points

1. Carla's book and resources: stop-trying.com — including where to find the book in print, digital, and audio formats.
2. Carla on Instagram: @carlaondrasik — she posts daily reminders and real-world examples of the try/do distinction.
3. Related reading on intentional action: Stop Doing Productive and Start Being Productive — if the distinction between trying and doing resonates, the idea of moving from doing productive to being productive goes even deeper here.

The shift Carla is describing isn't just semantic — it's a structural change in how you relate to your own intentions. When you stop using "try" as a buffer between yourself and commitment, something has to fill that space: a real decision, in either direction. Do it or don't. Both are more honest than the middle ground most of us live in. If this conversation landed, I'd encourage you to sit with it before moving on. And if you've got someone in your life who lives in try mode — consider what one honest conversation might make possible.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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.

That’s what made this discussion with Jon Acuff so compelling. Jon’s latest book, Procrastination Proof, doesn’t treat procrastination as a flaw to fix but as a pattern to understand—and ultimately, to work with rather than against.

Six Discussion Points

• Procrastination isn’t a laziness issue—it’s a pattern driven by time, task, fear, history, and ego 
• Permission can unlock progress more effectively than pressure or discipline
• Smaller actions reduce friction and make consistency sustainable rather than forced
• Review is the most overlooked multiplier—it reveals truth, direction, and better decisions
• Planning is where optimism meets realism—and most people get stuck between the two
• Alignment between “night you” and “morning you” turns intention into action without resistance

Three Connection Points

• Get Procrastination Proof
• Jon's previous appearance on APC
• Join the community to gain access to The Procrastination Course (and more)

What stood out most in this conversation is that procrastination isn’t something you defeat once—it’s something you learn to navigate. When you shift from forcing action to understanding patterns, the work changes. And more importantly, your relationship with the work changes. That’s where real progress begins.

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.

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 quiet trap many of us fall into when the pace picks up: we start reacting instead of leading. The inbox fills, the interruptions stack, and before long, the day is no longer ours—it’s everyone else’s.

In this conversation, I sit down with Rich Czyz, author of Autopilot: Practical Productivity for School Leaders, to explore how systems—not willpower—can help us reclaim that sense of direction. While his work is rooted in education, what we discuss applies far beyond school walls. This is about shifting from firefighting to forward thinking.

Six Discussion Points

• Productivity isn’t about doing more—it’s about reclaiming space for what actually matters
• The inbox is often just a collection of other people’s priorities unless you set boundaries around it
• Systems work best when they are simple enough to start immediately and flexible enough to evolve
• Batching and theming aren’t constraints—they’re ways to restore focus in fragmented environments
• Delegation requires letting go of control, not just tasks
• Elimination—not optimization—is often the most powerful first move toward meaningful work

Three Connection Points

• Autopilot: Practical Productivity for School Leaders
• Four O'Clock Faculty
• The Practice of Productiveness

If there’s a throughline in this conversation, it’s this: the goal isn’t to perfect your system—it’s to make space for what matters most. Whether you’re leading a school, a team, or simply your own day, the question is the same: what can you remove so that what remains has room to matter?

If this episode resonated, I’m exploring ideas like these more deeply in my upcoming book, Productiveness. You can follow along as it takes shape at mikevardy.com/productiveness.