Mike Vardy

There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens when a room full of accomplished people watches someone’s inbox on a screen and forgets what they came to learn. I watched it happen at a conference recently — a workshop about something else entirely, derailed for ten minutes because someone’s inbox had three messages in it. Nobody asked about the actual topic. Everyone wanted ...

I’ve spent years thinking, writing, and talking about why we procrastinate, so I came into this conversation with strong opinions already in place. What I didn’t expect was how cleanly Robin J Emdon’s framing would sharpen one of them. Most productivity advice — including plenty I’ve heard repeated for two decades — treats procrastination as a problem of systems and follow-th...

We tend to treat “tolerance” as a moral word — be tolerant, have tolerance for people who aren’t like you. That meaning is real and it matters. But there’s a second meaning we almost always ignore, and it might be the more useful one: tolerance is a range. In engineering it’s the band of variance a part can accept before it stops doing its job — and once you see that toleranc...

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how tired you are. It’s the exhaustion of trying too hard to sleep.

You’ve done everything right — you’re in bed at a reasonable hour, the room is dark, the phone is across the room — and yet the harder you concentrate on falling asleep, the more stubbornly awake you become. You check the clock. You...