Mike Vardy's Blog, page 25
March 2, 2022
Episode 412: Brittany Wagner talks about not giving up, taking a chance, and vulnerability
When Brittany Wagner reached out to be on the program, I honestly didn’t know that she was on a dock-series that I’d added to my Netflix queue called “Last Chance U.”
I started to go through some of the episodes and found Brittany to be, indeed, the breakout star of the show.
While Brittany is best known for her role on said hit Netflix docu-series, she’s a nationally respected athletic academic counselor. She wears a lot of other hats as well: mentor, mother, professor, and entrepreneur. She’s currently a professor at the University of Montevallo and – here’s another hat she wears – also is a motivational speaker.
We spoke about the honest and vulnerability she put into her book, “Next Chance You: Tools, Tips, and Tough Love for Bringing Your A-Game to Life” along with elements that she and those she mentors face time and time again – things like the importance of choice and dealing with overwhelm.
I didn’t know quite what to expect going into this conversation. But once I was in it, I really enjoyed it. I trust you will, too.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 412: Brittany Wagner talks about not giving up, taking a chance, and vulnerability appeared first on Productivityist.
February 23, 2022
Episode 411: Justin Jackson talks about Making and Modifying
My guest on this episode is my friend Justin Jackson. I wanted to revisit this conversation from April 2017, so I pulled it from the vault to share it with you once again.
Justin is a ton of things.
Justin’s a dad, a husband, an entrepreneur, and a coach. He’s the founder of Megamaker, cofounder of Transistor.fm, and cofounder of Meeps. He is also the author of Jolt, the creator of Marketing for Developers and Tiny Marketing Wins, and an overall serial maker.
Justin Jackson aims to help people through the things they create. And he does a great job at that.
On this episode, we discussed the processes of making and/or modifying. We spent time going over his systems and approaches in the different initiatives and creations he is working on.
It’s a conversation between two Canadians who just so happen to be friends. I really can’t wait to spend time with Justin Jackson again for another productive conversation. Until then, this one will do nicely.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 411: Justin Jackson talks about Making and Modifying appeared first on Productivityist.
February 21, 2022
How to “Do” Family Day Better
I’m typing this with a little over 30 minutes of time left to spare. That’s because it’s Family Day and it’s almost time for a “Zombie Nerf War” with my wife and son.
Family Day (the holiday) is held on the third Monday of February in my province. The idea behind it is to give families an opportunity to enjoy each others’ company and spend time together. It’s taken pretty seriously, too.
Let me give you an example.
My daughter and I decided to go for a coffee date on this Family Day. We found that several places we wanted to go to were closed. They were closed for – you guessed it – Family Day. (Ah, the irony.)
“A family is not an important thing, it’s everything.”
Michael J. Fox
I suppose having a day like this brings greater awareness to the above quote. In the “hecticity” of life, there’s a risk we lose sight of what’s really important. And that is family… no matter how we define it.
I think that’s why I celebrate one family day every single week of the year.
Try A Weekly Family DayYou see, every Saturday I give my overarching focus to family activities. These types of activities include going to the movies with my kids, handling errands and household chores, and connecting with other types of family (friends and members of TimeCrafting Trust).
That dedication to a single day of each week is crucial for me. It means I have a placeholder for those kind of tasks – the intentions that might not get the attention they deserve if such a day didn’t exist for me.
Family Day is an example of a Daily Theme, something I give to 6 days of the week. Daily Themes are designed to give an overarching focus for types of tasks that are related to an area of my life – work and home – that need sustained and regular attention.
Want a look at all of my Daily Themes? You can find them on my /now page.
Family Day is the Daily Theme that most people choose first when I teach this to them. I think it’s because family isn’t just the most important thing to them… it’s everything.
So if you’re like most people – including the ones I teach – then consider adding more than just one Family Day per year to the mix. Make it a weekly thing.
It’s worth it.
The post How to “Do” Family Day Better appeared first on Productivityist.
[image error]February 16, 2022
Episode 410: Michael Diettrich-Chastain talks about CHANGES
Change is never easy. And it’s constant.
It’s one of the things that we can rely on… even if we can’t rely on what it might hold for us.
That’s why you’re seeing the phrase “change management” so much more than ever before. You can’t really lead change; you can only manage it.
Or can you lead it?
That’s what Michael Diettrich-Chastain and I talk about during this episode of A Productive Conversation.
Michael is a bestselling author, leadership coach, facilitator and professional speaker. Michael and his team are passionate about helping organizations, leaders and teams become experts on change management, communication and emotional intelligence. So he knows a thing or to about not just managing change… but leading it to where you get the best outcome possible.
We talked about certainty and uncertainty and how the acronym he uses (CHANGES) can help organizations and their personnel deal with both. There’s a lot more that we get into surrounding the concept of change and I believe after listening to this conversation, you might just change your mind about how change can be handled to work for you more often than not.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 410: Michael Diettrich-Chastain talks about CHANGES appeared first on Productivityist.
February 14, 2022
The Concept of “Efforting”
When I first started writing about productivity, I was writing it from a position of parody. That’s where Effing The Dog – which later became Eventualism – came from. It was this idea that FTD was a parody of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or GTD.
But people misunderstood what the “f” in FTD stood for.
Now, I definitely played on that acronyms a little bit. I knew what people thought the F would stand for. But it wasn’t spelled FTD. It was spelled EffTD.
You see, I decided that the “Eff” in EffTD stood for “efforting.”
What is Efforting?Efforting is the act of making an effort.
Now, I’m not sure if this is a word or not, but back then I didn’t care. I still don’t. If anything, I relish in the fact that it doesn’t exist as a word but probably should.
I believe that we get so hung up in checking off boxes and allocating time to certain things that we miss the ingredient of effort along the way. An effort doesn’t just come from nowhere. It takes time, attention, and energy — and only one of those things happens without us. (Time.)
Energy flows and our body clock definitely plays a role in that. But we recognize when we have high or low energy and when we do – we have a greater command over it than we do of time.
The same goes for attention. While it can be argued – and rightly so – that our attention is constantly under siege, we do have the capability of focusing it more than we do our time. Because in one moment it is one period of time and that period disappears as quickly as it arrived.
When we combine the effort — the ingredients or elements of time, as well as energy and attention, we can release the effort that we are giving to something. And that’s why you’ve heard the phrase ‘A for effort’.
You may not necessarily be good at something. But if you give it your best effort then that’s something to celebrate.
Agency and Its Effect on EffortAs you get older, you get to decide more about what you are willing to do and what you are not willing to do. You recognize things that you’re good at. And you see things that you’re not good at no matter how much effort you give them.
I will give you an example from my own life.
Back when I was a teenager, I went on a ski trip with my school. I went skiing on a small slope in Milton, Ontario, Canada. I’m not much of an athlete. It’s not that I don’t enjoy watching sports but participating in them is not my strongest suit.
So, when we went skiing it really came as no surprise to me that I didn’t do so well with it. I tried – putting in enough effort to see what I could do with it (although I will admit that because I didn’t really want to be there my effort wasn’t as strong as it could’ve been) and I did not do so well.
Fast forward to my 47th year. My family wanted to go skiing on Mount Washington. My wife and my daughter were able to ski. However, my son had never skied before but he definitely had a bit more of the athletic elements to him than I did. So we went skiing. We took a lesson and every single member of my family was able to progress through the lessons quite quickly. Except for me.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t great at skiing. There had been very little improvement over my abilities since that school skiing trip.
Here’s a difference. I tried harder. And I tried harder because I wanted to be part of something with my family. I didn’t care as much about whether or not I would enjoy the process more than I did but I wanted them to enjoy it with me. But try as I might – putting in more effort than I did when I was younger – I couldn’t figure it out.
And in the moment where I fell for the umpteenth time going down the training slope, I decided that I didn’t want to put any more effort into skiing. So, I went up the hill final time, took off the skis and returned all the equipment and sat patiently waiting for my family to finish up their lesson. Renew the writings on the wall and they were fine with it. I think they were just happy that I gave it a try.
But in that moment and on that day I decided that I would not put a single iota of effort into skiing again.
No more time. The same for attention… and energy.
Efforting IS a WordEverything is a word. And I think it’s a word that is directly related to productivity. Getting things done isn’t the pier measurement of productivity as far as I’m concerned. And giving an effort to everything that you do so that you can ultimately be who you want to be and do more of what you want is important. You can illuminate what you have no interest in pursuing. You can figure out what you are really good at and devote more attention to those things instead of splitting your attention and time and energy across too many things.
Committing your time to something isn’t enough. Neither is committing your energy – at least not on its own. When you commit your attention to something, you’re getting closer but it’s when you combine all three of those things – resulting in a committed effort that you ultimately are committing at the highest possible level.
Without effort, you’re closer to just doing productive instead of being productive. With effort, you’re in a much better place.
Want to explore some of my earlier productivity parody work? Check out this piece on the EffTD version of outsourcing.
The post The Concept of “Efforting” appeared first on Productivityist.
February 9, 2022
Episode 409: Luke Burgis talks about Wanting, Journaling, and Fulfillment
Who is
The origins of TimeCrafting actually started with the acronym NOW: Need to do, Ought to do, and Want to do.
The idea was that if we get through the things we need to do and be more deliberate about the things we ought to do (by turning them into a “need to do” or “want to do”) then we can get to the things that we want to more often than not.
But it turns out that while the idea of wanting has a lot of power, not all of it is necessarily good.
That’s why I’m glad to have had this conversation with Luke Burgis.
As the author of “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life,” Luke has spent plenty of time and energy researching the power of desire. I absolutely loved getting into the book and wanted to spend some time getting into the nuts and bolts with Luke about why “wanting” has so much power… and what to do with that power.
We unpacked a lot during our discussion – from impostor syndrome to needs and wants becoming one and the same (or appearing to be) to attempting to avoid choosing the wrong things to desire. I learned a lot from this conversation, making it incredibly productive.
I trust you’ll learn a lot, too.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 409: Luke Burgis talks about Wanting, Journaling, and Fulfillment appeared first on Productivityist.
February 7, 2022
The Long Game
“It’s finally paying off.”
I said this to myself with my head in my hands, letting all of the emotion that was years in the making overwhelm and flow out of me. Joy, relief, excitement, and other feelings were cascading through me in that moment.
The Cincinnati Bengals were going to the Super Bowl for the first time since I was 14 years old.
I’m not from Cincinnati, but I fell in love with the Bengals when I was 7 years old. My father was watching them play in their first Super Bowl and I happened to walk into the rec room while the game was on. I noticed the striking tiger-striped helmets – something I’d never seen before on a football helmet – and was drawn in.
“Who’s that?” I said, pointing at the orange and black team on the screen.
“They’re the Cincinnati Bengals,” my dad replied.
I sat down with him to watch the rest of the game. Even though they (which I shifted to “we” once I adopted them as my team) lost, I was now a fan.
The Long Game BeginsI stuck with them during the years where they made a return to the Super Bowl – where they lost to San Francisco AGAIN – and during the awful 90s. That loyalty never wavered, even as they dwelled in mediocrity (both lower-level and upper-level) up until they broke their 31 year playoff-winning drought.
And they broke it big time.
They won the AFC Championship. I was ecstatic. Years of loyalty were rewarded as I got text messages and phone calls and social media posts congratulating me on the Bengals win. (You know, because “we” won.)
Everything about this playoff run was satisfying on so many levels. It took years to get to this point, with plenty of hazards and heartbreak along the way.
But that’s what happens when you are in it from the long haul. When you play the long game, you needed to be patient with the progress. The process will change along the way.
I believe that you should have small intention and big intentions, just like you should celebrate the small wins and the big wins. I also believe that while the short game does have its place, the long game is what will get you to the place you want to be.
Giving The Long Game What It NeedsSo as you tackle your to-do list and check over your calendar for today, ask yourself if what’s there is helping you with the long game.
Are those things serving your intentions or are they swerving you away from them? Are you doing things in the moment just for the sake of doing them or are they helping you be who you want to be… both at work and in life?
The Cincinnati Bengals were not-so-affectionately known as “The Bungles” for years – over 30 of them. With this run of success they’ve shed that tag and have another associated with them: champions.
Don’t bungle the long game for the sake of the short one. Champion your intentions and invest your attention on the long game and it’ll pay off.
By the way, here’s a GREAT Twitter thread from Brad Stulberg that’s related to playing the long game.
The post The Long Game appeared first on Productivityist.
February 2, 2022
Episode 408: Thomas Anderson talks about Vulnerability
Who is Thomas Anderson?
Better still, who is he to write a book on vulnerability?
I ask this question during my conversation with him on this episode of the podcast.
He’s just a normal person, by his own admission. But when Thomas realized that his own openness and sharing of vulnerability helped others to do the same, it took him to a place to sharing his story of vulnerability.
Thomas’s book is a journal of sorts – much like Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” is a journal of sorts. I’ve long been a fan of journaling and that’s why we spend a good deal of our discussion on the topic of journaling.
(And the concept of emotional intelligence comes into play, too.)
Do vulnerability and productivity go hand-in-hand? I think so. Setting boundaries, sharing limitations, dealing with overwhelm, are all part of both of them.
I know that once you’re done listening to our conversation that you’ll see the relationship between productivity and vulnerability.
And you might just be closer to the aim of being productive rather than “doing” productive, too.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 408: Thomas Anderson talks about Vulnerability appeared first on Productivityist.
January 31, 2022
The Power of Bit by Bit Productivity
I want to share with you the concept of bit by bit productivity in this piece. But first I’d like to tell you about the time I discovered that someone who I didn’t think followed the concept actually did – and does so in a big way to this day.
When people think about Gary Vaynerchuk, they tend to think about this one word: hustle.
And rightly so. I did, too.
It’s something that he has preached in his YouTube videos for a long time — not to mention in plenty of other content.
However, when I saw him speak at VidSummit several years ago he spoke about something different.
He spoke about patience.
I don’t think we talking about patience when it comes to many things, particularly productivity. We tend to want results now. We look for instant gratification.
The quick win. Inbox zero as an achievement. The home run.
But the best kind of progress isn’t always what happens when you swing for the fences. Slow and steady progress.
What I’m talking about it bit by bit productivity.
Bit by bit productivity isn’t just something that is valuable to consider. It’s something that’s worth adopting because it’s sustainable.
Hustle isn’t sustainable. Patience is.
Walking The TalkWhen I started to build my business, I knew it was going to take time to build. The podcast, this blog, my YouTube channel. All of it has been built over time.
When someone asks me how I make money on my podcast and how they can too, I respond with the following:
“Do it for a long time.”
That’s how I did it. That’s how most of the people that I know who make money podcasting have done it.
The same goes for blogging. Or through YouTube. (I’m not there on YouTube yet, but that’s okay. It’ll happen.)
Bit by bit productivity is the way to sustainability.
It’s the way to stave off overwhelm and strive for excellence.
And it’s the way to stop doing productive and start being productive.
The post The Power of Bit by Bit Productivity appeared first on Productivityist.
January 26, 2022
Episode 407: Rob Walker talks about The Art of Noticing
Over the past 7+ years of hosting this podcast, I noticed something: I’ve never gone back into previous conversations and revisited them with you. So I decided to make that more of a thing going forward.
The first episode of this podcast that I felt deserved to get pulled out from the vault was the one where noticing was the topic of conversation. Rob Walker knows a thing or two about noticing.
I’ve gone back to his book a few times since I was first sent a copy to read for our discussion back in May 2019. Considering that I focus on the importance of both intention and attention when it comes to time management and productivity, noticing is a natural thing for me to explore further. Noticing is a habit that I need to nurture. As Rob so aptly put during our conversation:
“It is not about your skill at noticing, more on the habit of noticing that sort of forces you to see differently and to see things that you weren’t looking for.”
I’m getting better at noticing. I trust after you listen to this conversation – and pick up Rob’s book – that you will too.
Want to support the show? Then take a look at our podcast sponsors page.
There you will find a variety of products and services designed to help you lead a more productive life.
Want to support the podcast? Beyond checking out our sponsors, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Click on any of the links below to make that happen.
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
You can also click on this link to paste the podcast feed into your podcast app of choice.
Thanks again for listening to A Productive Conversation. See you later.
The post Episode 407: Rob Walker talks about The Art of Noticing appeared first on Productivityist.
