Eager to Be Healthy – Mike Vardy – The Might of Will

Mike Vardy: I’m Mike Vardy, I’m eager to be healthy. ⁓

Michael Scott Eger: to the Eager to Be Healthy podcast with Michael Scott Eager. How to be happy while being healthy and living life to the fullest.

Mike Vardy: Learn how

Michael Scott Eger: On this show we have my favorite Canadian in the entire world on. And he’s actually the one that allows us to produce this show. Not because he does the work, but he actually allows me to manage my time so I can maximize my life to the full potential. So I want to introduce my good friend and probably the most productive Canadian that I know, Mike Vardy.

Mike Vardy: Thanks for having me on Michael, I really appreciate it. And yeah, there are other Canadians out there, but maybe I am the most productive.

Michael Scott Eger: All I know is I felt that working with you was going to maximize my life’s potential. And what I found is when we started to have our conferences, I started to produce more work and started to relax a lot more and started to have more fun. And a lot of people are always in this hectic, regal role of life and not having enough time and not having enough fun. There’s so many choices yet they want to do so much. And what you work with me about allows me to do more of the things I want to do yet be more productive at the same time.

Mike Vardy: Yeah, it’s funny. We have a lot of people out there that are carrying this badge of being busy as a badge of honor. And really, we’re in a world where there’s so much coming at us all the time that we end up spending a lot of time focusing on just a whole bunch of stuff instead of focusing on the right stuff. And that’s the kind of thing I try to teach people is how to, ⁓ you know, I don’t there are a bunch of different apps you can use and all that stuff. And there’s different work styles everybody has. But I try to offer some, you know, some sage advice and some you really practical insights and tactical approaches that allow people to kind of get through the stuff that they need to do kind of wade through the stuff that they may think that they ought to do but don’t necessarily have to so they can get really get to the stuff that they want to do and because ultimately what we’re looking for here is is productivity is a lifestyle like I mean a lot of people think productivity is just related to work but if you are ⁓ living a productive life in terms of being effective and efficient that makes you better than you’ve been before and that will ultimately translate and transcend into your life and of course into your health.

Michael Scott Eger: What do you do to stay healthy?

Mike Vardy: Well, one of the things that I do is I try to really be mindful of what I’m eating and how I, especially since I’m a father of two kids and I work from home. One of the things we try to do is we try to plan accordingly so that we can have a healthy and balanced lifestyle in terms of what we take in as well as what kind of exercise and stuff we get away with. for me, that all starts with some of the stuff we’ve talked about in our sessions, which is the idea of building routines. So I think that by, for me, one of the biggest things I’ve done in order to kind of build these healthy habits is have a similar way I start my morning in a similar way that I end my day by having those kind of keystone kind of routines that start my day and end my day. They allow me to kind of do things like meal planning, which my wife and I do every, every Sunday. Basically we sit down and we plan out our meals for the next week. And, and we’ve gotten to the point now we almost have two weeks worth of meals planned in advance. which allows us to eat healthier as opposed to what a lot of people end up doing in the very busy culture we live in, which is just go to the market, buy what they need, come home and cook, or they go to a restaurant and either spend money that they don’t have or spend money that they may want to spend elsewhere, or they just eat fast food, which means they’re not putting the right things in their body anyways. I think the ultimate starting point for me is always having these routines in place so that I have a similar way to start my day and a similar way to end my day so they bookend my day really nicely. And that allows me to fit in the things that are important. Doing yoga, meditating, reading, because reading for me is really a healthy habit as well, as well as, like I said, planning meals and cooking ⁓ healthier meals so that we can actually take care of our kids and take care of our own bodies as well. Because I’m a 40-year-old guy with a four-year-old son. I want to be, when I’m 50, he’s going to be a teenager. I want to be able to keep up with this kid. So I have to start doing this now and be proactive about it so that I don’t have to worry about being reactive to it later.

Michael Scott Eger: One the things when work with you, I notice is that I’m planning ahead more. And I teach people never to eat hungry. And the reason is if you’re eating, if you’re hungry, you start making short sighted moves. So you, by planning ahead, you actually, you actually plan for all the contingencies. And then you’re always coming from a place that you know when your next meal is coming. And that’s huge.

Mike Vardy: Yeah, and the other thing is we’re not stuck with eating noodles three nights in a row or we space things out and we’re more intentional about it. There’s certain meals that we know our kids aren’t necessarily going to want to eat, so we space those meals out with some that they are. It’s matter of… The other thing I do is I’m just as guilty of looking online for life hacks and stuff because I was a managing editor for life hacks for a long time, so I look for these tips too. today for lunch actually about an hour before we started this call. My wife and I, do is we do the salad in a jar thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen that online where basically you put your salad dressing in the bottom, you fill up all your heavier stuff that goes in the bottom of the jar and then you basically layer it and then what you do is when you’re ready to eat lunch, you just dump the jar out and boom, there’s your salad. We do that in advance. I mean, it gives you… that ability to be proactive so that you, like you said, you are able to make better choices because you’re not, you know, rushing around. You’re actually being proactive and planning things ahead. Most people don’t take that time to plan. And you know what they say, if you fail to plan, plan to fail.

Michael Scott Eger: Just the small things when I forget to plan. One of the things we’ve been working on and this is a little bit of my vulnerability is I lose keys. So just getting the ritual when I come home, put the key on the hook. So when I go to work, I know where the key is. One gives me peace and saves me time and allows me to have the freedom to really start to think about how hire things, who I’m going to have on this show, what I’m going to write about, what recipes I’m going to try, what movie I’m going see, all those things that I free my brain up to really enjoy what I’m doing and having life just because I have those systems at hand. I guess we should talk about some of the best ways that you can maximize free will and self-control. Now you mentioned planning ahead, but is there any other strategies you want to focus on?

Mike Vardy: Yeah, I think one of the big things that people don’t really do that they should do more of is the idea of capturing. A lot of people, what they’ll do is they keep it in their head and they’ll say, I’ll remember it later. I’ll remember it later. And how often do you not remember it later? More often than you would like to admit or even like to think about. Your brain is meant to be a factory, not a warehouse. If you free your mind up to do the deep thinking that it’s meant to do, such as maybe come up with creative. ways to ⁓ make sure that you don’t lose your keys. For example, for me, one of the things I just put out ⁓ in a recent newsletter was how I have my office designed in productivity zones. So I have different zones. I’m able to let my brain do that real deep thinking because I am capturing things. I built this capture habit of, hey, I have this thought in mind. I’m going to write it down right away and get it into my task manager either right away or eventually from my paper notebook. So that way I know that I’m trusting that system and my brain doesn’t have to worry about, know, ⁓ I’ve got to go buy cottage cheese from the grocery store. Instead, it’s thinking I’ve written down cottage cheese, so I know that I’ll look at that when the time is right. Instead, I’m going to worry about, you know, this next piece of ⁓ workshop that I’m working on or what have you. So building that capture habit is so critical. And the other kind of the again, the bookend to that is the journaling habit. Journaling is really really healthy in a number of ways. Number one, it allows you to kind of close those open loops in your head. How many times have you gone to bed and you’re laying there with your eyes open going, I wonder what do I have to do tomorrow or what didn’t I do today? By journaling, you get that out of the way. You celebrate your successes. You acknowledge the things that didn’t go quite the way you wanted them to. And further to that, you’re actually doing what It like a mini review every single day so that when it’s time to look at the bigger picture and do a larger review whether you do David Allen’s GTD weekly review or whatnot David GTD stands for of course getting things done his is very popular book you you’ve already started to build this habit and you’re not going to be stuck in this the weeds of a of a really deep weekly review because you’re doing this regularly so anything like that those two like the capturing process and then the reviewing process through the art of journaling. Those are really, really simple ways that you can start to free your mind up so that you can let it do the thing it does best, which is the deeper, more holistic stuff that computers and apps just can’t do for you.

Michael Scott Eger: The whole process of journaling, as you said I’m going to translate, is figuring out what works and what didn’t work. So the things you’re grateful for and the things you’re celebrating are the things that work. And what didn’t work is everything that you’re like, maybe we’ll change that. And that type of review, most people just don’t take it and slow down and look at it. That’s something that I’m starting to do right now. That’s one of areas that I’m, you’re working with me more than other skills. But ⁓ I do see the value when I do it and that’s huge. So before we go on, because ⁓ we kind of skipped your intro and I like to make sure people understand how you develop these techniques. Why are you so efficient? ⁓ Efficient and and what makes me want to work with you?

Mike Vardy: Well, first off, think I’m efficient because I’ve built these workflows that I’ve gotten better at and they’ve, of course, become faster at it. I’m a big believer in productivity as effectiveness first, efficiency second. I think that that’s the goal that we should be striving for. A lot of people kind of equate productivity with efficiency and that’s a bit of a misnomer. Same thing with I’m also a big believer in quality over quantity. I’d rather write a really nice ⁓ 500 word blog posts than a crappy thousand word one. So but for me, what’s kind of got me to this place is I was trying to balance a bunch of stuff in my life when I was working for Costco. I worked for Costco for 11 years. ⁓ The comedy bug bit me again. I was I was, of course, ⁓ a theater performer in high school. And when I moved out west from from I was in the Toronto area before moving out to where I live now, which is in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. I was trying to balance my comedy career and my Costco career. The only way to do that was to adopt some productivity practices. I read the Tony Robbins rapid planning method. I read Stephen Covey’s stuff, the seven habits of highly effective people. I discovered David Allen’s work, getting things done. From there, just started to really study. how people think about their work and how people think about productivity and how they’re able to kind of develop their own style. And from there, that kind of became my new passion. Eventually, I left Costco slowly but surely. I worked my way down from being one of the mid-level managers to the guy who greeted you at the front door and bid you farewell as you left the building to ⁓ running my own business from home. Productivity is now that I’ve been doing for a few years. I’ve been in this field for about a decade now. And I think what’s happened is I’ve gone from being an enthusiast, someone who just really explored these things to a specialist, which is somebody who can really understand them. And now I’m at a higher level. But now I’ve become a strategist of sorts, which is the idea of how can I help people by giving them some strategies that are going to help them be more effective and efficient? Because a lot of stuff out there, I love a lot of it out there. But I mean, some of it is just people They don’t dive into it because it’s either too complicated or too tough to adopt. So I’m trying to find simpler ways in a very complex world for people to be able to dive in and get more of the right things done. So that’s kind of where I’m from. And I mean, again, being a stay at home parent, I get the best of both worlds in terms of seeing life from a workplace perspective, having worked for a large organization and now working from home and having to have separation there. versus being the guy who’s home with his kids and every Wednesday is daddy duty day because my son’s home with me. ⁓ being able to kind of shift between the working father and the stay at home father, that’s given me some real perspective as well because while they’re two very different areas of one’s life, you need to be able to shift between the two in order to have what someone would call a balanced life and a healthy life.

Michael Scott Eger: When you do all this, you’re making commitments to yourself, to your family, to your purpose, everything. How do you make that happen?

Mike Vardy: It’s all frameworks. It’s all systems. It’s the idea of how do I, you know, what’s important to me looking at those important things, getting better at saying no over saying yes, saying no a lot more these days. But I’ve got some frameworks and workflows in place that kind of help me. For example, every, like I said, that capture habit has been indispensable because if some, mean, for example, when you wanted to do this discussion. You sent me a list of what we needed to talk about and I looked at that list and instead of saying thanks for the list, the question I say is what does this list mean? Where does this go? So I start asking different questions and I start going into things with more of a mission than kind of an exploration mindset. So when I get an email, I don’t say I wonder what email I have. When I go into my email application, I don’t say, hey, I wonder what awaits me there. I go always go in with a mission saying, okay, here are the emails I need to deal with. And that’s because I put them in the proper place. I put them in my task management application. So I know you’re using Todoist as well. And that’s what I use for my personal and professional stuff. Now, mind you, I’m using Asana for my productivity stuff because I have such a large team. So once I added that to the equation, it was actually pretty easy to add it because I just said, okay, this is a new cog in the workflow. How do I make sure that I don’t miss that? I know in Todoist, I’ll create a label, which is one of the components of Todoist called Asana. And when I see a task that says that Asana label to it, I know I need to go to Asana. So it’s all about triggers, right? I mean, everything we do is triggered by something, you know, whether it’s pain, pleasure, a word. ⁓ That’s how I’m able to do it. And it didn’t happen overnight. And there’s always going to be little subtle tweaks I make. I’m a big believer that you have to have three things in order to be really productive. ⁓ Intention and attention are two of big ones, but awareness is huge. And we talked about that actually recently, Michael, like the idea of awareness. And I want to build awareness consistently. I want to be able to say, okay, you know, what does this mean? What value does this have? Because ultimately, when I look at something with intention, if it doesn’t have the proper attention, then it’s powerless. I’ve said this before, intention without attention is powerless. And attention without intention is directionless. So for me, having that awareness, which is all centered around, you what do I really want? Why? You know, this old Simon Sinek saying start with why. I I have to have I capture everything and I put it where it needs to go, because if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t happen. And it may seem for a lot of people like, why would you spend time doing that? Well, the reason is I want to achieve. I want to get a lot of stuff done. Anybody who’s an achiever has systems in place and frameworks because those constraints help them kind of monitor what they really want to accomplish. So. I think that by using a task management application, by using your calendar in a way that makes sense, and doesn’t leave you with a state of overwhelm, by using a combination of paper tools and digital tools, I’m able to kind of manage my work life, my home life, my friends life. I’m going to play, mean, my friends and I now have a standing appointment to do a ⁓ board game night once a month, and that’s important to me. So I make sure that that gets blocked out. My wife and I… We have weekly meetings on Mondays and those aren’t date nights either. know a lot of people like, well, I just have meetings, but we just talk about that during date night. No, we have a meeting where we do that meal planning. We talk about where we talk about, you know, what camps we want to put the kids in. That’s a meeting that we schedule. And then we have date nights where guess what? We go on a date. We just do stuff that you want to do. So, I mean, it’s all about, again, foresight, frameworks and focus. Those are the three big keywords right now. Like and all of that. didn’t happen overnight. takes time. And that’s where the work I do on productivity is. Some of the books I offer, as well as the coaching that I work with people on. That’s where I can help people.

Michael Scott Eger: Just to summarize what I know about neuroscience is our brain only really has four really good short-term working spots and I focus on only having three things in my brain and Even better than having three things. I have one thing that’s most important of all The only way I can do that is writing everything down. So I Look at piece of information. I categorize it. I record it I basically offload it off my brain and put it in something that I can search or something that will schedule me to find it again which is Evernote, Todoist, Inbox and Mailbox for my email and that just frees up my creative side and you’re making time for the fun things in life so that game night with your friends you actually set the side time because it’s important to you You make a commitment to your fun and you set it in your schedule. you’re with your wife, there’s family meeting time where you focus on just how you’re running the house. That way when you’re having your date night, you can be totally present and enjoy the love from your wife and enjoy the time you have with her as if it’s your first date. And most people just don’t understand how special that is. And I think sometimes when we’re blaming all these systems, we forget or we don’t really put out how human it makes us feel when the systems work.

Mike Vardy: Well, and that’s the thing. So many people don’t realize that they’re already living in systems anyways. So when I tell you know, when you’re reading like a self-help book or you’re learning about productivity or whatever and you say, well, I don’t really want to have a system. Guess what? We as human beings thrive when we have systems. Constraints help us. You I mean, if you look at and you mentioned an interesting point, Michael, when you said, you you categorize things. Most people don’t realize that we work very differently than how we live in a lot of ways. So, for example, When we work a lot of people work by project right they work by I want to get this project done project a done and I’m going to do steps one through ten to get them done but sometimes you get stalled at step four so what do you do well you do nothing because you you’re used to working by project but we don’t live that way I mean I often will tell people when you go grocery shopping do you shop by your meal plan for the week Monday through Friday and go by you know okay Monday we’re having steak and broccoli I’m going to go to the meat department to buy steak. And then I’m to go to the produce to get broccoli on Monday and then come back to the center of the store and ⁓ Tuesday’s chicken and cauliflower. OK, I’m to go to the meat department again and then go back. No, you would never shop that way. It be a waste of time and you would look insane. You look like an insane. But that’s how we work. Instead, you shop by category. You shop by modality. Right. And I think more people would benefit by work, you know, by focusing on their modes or their categories. So if you want to, ⁓ you know, if you’re at gym or you’re at the supermarket rather than say, you I want to look at all the errands I have to run that are just errands, create a category called healthy errands or create a category called health or a mode called health. One of the things my wife and I did this Christmas is we bought each other bicycles off of a company in New York, a brand new bicycle company. And her bike arrived this week. It took three months. But I mean, the very popular bike company. But we bought them. And now we’re ready to start going on family bike rides together. And that was something that we decided that we wanted to do. And that’s a health choice. That’s a fitness choice. So if that’s important to me, when I’m looking at, know, when I want to buy like we had to buy front brakes for them because it rains a lot here in Victoria, I put the task in Todoist to say buy front brakes for new bikes. And I didn’t put the category of errands or email or whatever. I put health because That’s why it’s related to my health. And when you can connect your tasks to something that matters more, which is what labels do in Todoist or tags in Asana or Contacts or modes or whatever you want to call them. When you can do that, your tasks carry more weight. You can connect to them a lot easier if you want to use your three words for the year like Chris Brogan talks about, or you want to connect them to something that really has a lasting effect. Do that because when you categorize your tasks accordingly, The ones that carry more weight with you, the ones that more important, will undoubtedly rise to the top. And then you’ll want to get them done as opposed to let them get buried amongst all the other minutiae that’s out there.

Michael Scott Eger: We make choices all the time. We make choices on what to eat, which toothbrush to use, which fork to use, which glass to use, all these minutiae choices. And yet, there’s choices that we want to make. Like what movie to see, where to go with our special sweethearts, where to go on vacation, what restaurants do I want to go to next. What do I want to write about? For you and me, we want to interview or basically our next book. I’m trying not to stutter here. But I guess what I’m trying to say is those choices are made so much easier when we’re not spending the mental energy on the minutia. When you have the systems in place, it seems Correct me if I’m wrong, that your brain has more of the potential, more of the capability to focus on your passions, your wants, your desires, your love, your happiness, your health. Can we really expand on that?

Mike Vardy: Sure. think one of the things that you made a really great point about is that decision fatigue idea. this is, mean, neuroscience is a huge component right now. There’s lots of books out there. I just interviewed David Allen, of course, the founder of GTD for the Productivities podcast not too long ago. And he talked about, know, Brain Chains, a great book that’s out there. There’s The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitan. There’s a lot of stuff about neuroplasticity and neuroscience. But one of the books he talks about is called Willpower. And Willpower, I mean, We’ve taught you you’ve followed my work long enough. You know, I’m a huge Green Lantern fan. Now, a lot of people like, ⁓ great. Another comic book guy. But the key for me is Green Lanterns. I will buy ⁓ it. It’s what’s the ⁓ my gosh, you caught me off guard here. It’s in Brightest Day and Blackest Night. No, it’s OK. In Brightest Day and Blackest Night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evils might beware my power. Green Lanterns light.

Michael Scott Eger: My Sorry I geeked out with you.

Mike Vardy: Interestingly enough, is never mentioned in the credo, but the green ring is powered by Will. If you look at the idea of Willpower, when you wake up and start your day, you have a full charged ring of Willpower. mean, you’re fully charged, but as the day goes by, it drains. If you start capturing and create these triggers and these waypoints, then decision fatigue isn’t as tough. example, the meal planning thing is a great example. If you are ready to cook dinner and you can look at the whiteboard on your fridge and see what the recipe, what you’re cooking, and not just what you’re cooking, instead of just seeing chicken, you see chicken cordon bleu and you see the page number for the recipe book, and which is what we do. We have three or four recipe books we use. We basically take the acronym, of the recipe book and put the page number. I don’t what do I have to do? I go to look at the whiteboard. I open the recipe book. I grab the recipe book that it indicates. Open it to that page and follow the directions. Simple as that. Whereas if it just said chicken. OK, what kind of chicken recipe I’m going to make? Let me look up what recipe I want. Blah. Or worse, what if I don’t have anything there? So by doing that, I save my willpower and we all do. for the things I really need it for, like working on the book or planning my next workshop or whatever. And you know that I’m a night owl. We’ve talked about this before. I’m not a morning person. I’m a night owl. So my best creative work, because of the comedy career that I had, is generally still wired to be done at night. So I try to design my day in a way that limits the amount of choices I have to make in terms of high bandwidth choices throughout the day so I can say, hey, you know what? Breakfast in the morning is a NutriBullet Shake. I planned it the night before, boom, it’s ready to go. Same thing with my evening routine where I mark down those three absolutes. You talked about the three things that you do and we remember things best in threes. That’s why I my three absolutes. But I don’t do those first thing in the morning. I do them at night because at night I’m at my wisest, I’m at my most ⁓ knowledgeable for what lays ahead. And when I wake up in the morning, I’m a… I’m groggy little kid who would be distracted by the shiniest object out there. It’s all about setting up these things in advance so that you can avoid the sapping of that willpower you have and having clearer mindsets to make better choices. If you don’t have those things in place, you were saying, your choices become muddled, they become rushed, they’re not as clear, they’re not as focused. You end up just going through the motions instead of following your passions that you really want to focus on. I would say like all of these little new little things that I’ve done along the way again, remember this didn’t just happen overnight. I can look at it and say, okay, you know what? In the morning, I know I have a bulletproof coffee, have an AeroPress coffee and I have a ⁓ New for Bullet shake at lunchtime. We’ve already prepared my salad in a jar. Boom, that’s lunch. Like I don’t have to think about that stuff. I mean, Look at President Barack Obama. He is he the current president. He basically has two suits, gray suit and a blue suit. Why? Because he doesn’t want to think about what he puts on in the morning. He picks one of two suits because I think he has more important decisions to make throughout the day. So if you can do that kind of stuff and there are other simple hacks you can do to that are great for wellness, great for one life hack that I’ve used. And this is one that life hacker talked about is every season. I go through my closet and I turn, I look at my clothes and I turn the hooks so that they face outward. So the opening faces outward. And then at the end of the season, I look to see which hooks are still facing outward, the openings. And if they’re still facing outward, guess what? I haven’t worn that article of clothing in three months. Cause you know, you’ve probably done this before where you keep articles of clothing for years thinking you wear it all the time, but you probably don’t. So anything you can do to trigger your brain to go, wait a minute. I thought I wore this every week or every month, but I haven’t worn this in four months. Do I really need to keep it? It’s any of these little tricks you can do. These are like those mind hacks or those life hacks. They help avoid that decision fatigue, which, you know, can sap your energy, sap your willpower and sap your drive throughout the day. So any of these little things can really help.

Michael Scott Eger: One of the things I want to focus on is keeping commitments to other people’s time. We’re coming to that point that I want to show you you taught me something. At 5.30 sharp, we hang up. So this is your time to basically shine. Tell us about the productivity podcast. Tell us what we have to do to work with you and I’m going to give you lot more latitudes than most of my guests because I know you’re man of integrity and anything you stand behind is a quality product.

Mike Vardy: Well, thank you, Mike. Honestly, if you go to productivityus.com, myself and the team that I’ve got working with me there have a lot of great articles. are more technical. Some are more holistic. I’ve got my Productivityus workbook, which is going to be getting updated. if anyone was to buy it now, you’re going to get an update. It’ll be updated probably, I would say, by the middle of the year. You’re going to get an update for it. Anyone who buys it now is going to get it for the… They’ll get the update included for the current price because the price is going to go up. If you’re using something like Asana, which is a great task management option for scalability, myself and Jeremy Roberts have created a product called Do Better with Asana, which actually gets you, if you buy the premium version, which is a membership, gets you access, direct access to me once per month, as well as my usual productivity as coaching, which we’re going through a bit of a revamp now. And I know that Michael, you’re getting some of the coaching, but you’re getting it through the Productivity as Podcast, which is ⁓ available over at Patreon.com slash productivityist and what it is there is there’s 32 people with a real uptick in supporters. Basically, if you support the podcast, Patreon, the way it works, it’s like an ongoing Kickstarter. You can get up to, you know, if you donate up to $50 per month, you will get a 20 minute coaching session with me every month. And the only way you can get sessions with me now is either through that way or through signing up for productivityist coaching unlimited. which is something that we’re going to be launching in the next couple of weeks. Beyond that, mean, there’s lots of stuff out there. I’ve done a creative live talk, which you can purchase up at creative live, which is great. It’s a three. It was, went over three days in November of 2013. A lot of the stuff is still very relevant cause it’s approach based and you can get that, think for $149. I might be wrong, but if you go to creative live and look me up there, that’s a three, like it’s 12, 12 or more hours of me just talking time management. And then in May, I’m going to be launching a Kickstarter for my next book. and this is the one I’m going to self publish. I’m working on two books currently, one that I’m going to go through the traditional route and then another one which I’m going to do self publishing. And it’s going to it’s basically my seminal work. So it’s going to be launching on May 1st, May Day, the day of help. Go figure. That’s that’s when I’ll be doing that. But if you want to follow me and follow what I’m doing, productivity is dot com is the best place to go productivity and then I see at the end. And I’m also at Mike Vardy on the Twitter. You can find me there as well. I’m sure you’re going to have links and show notes and stuff as well, Michael. But yeah, I mean, I my goal is to help people get more effective and be more efficient and just, you know, get to do the stuff that they really want to do, because I’ve been able to do that myself. And I mean, I’m not making a ton of money doing this stuff, but I don’t need to. I want to, you know, have time with my family, have a healthy life. I want to be able to be. ⁓ to able to go on vacation and enjoy time with my family without having to check email or without having to worry about what’s going on with be able to pass on the business to other people and say, you run it while I go away. So, I mean, that’s my goal and I’m glad I’m helping you out and I’m hoping with all my other clients and anyone who’s reading, I mean, I just got a great ⁓ email today about the newsletter, which you could sign up for productivityist.com. said, thanks so much for your newsletter and just your simple tips because they’ve made a world of difference. That’s why I do what I do. that’s I mean, it’s so rewarding because I get to do that and I still get to perform. I get to do talks and stuff like that. So I get to do workshops and and get the performance stuff out that I used to do when I was doing comedy. So, yeah, I just want to thank you for having me on and thank you for giving me the opportunity to kind of just talk about what I do. And hopefully I’ll be able to help a few more people out along.

Michael Scott Eger: I actually, I’m hearing your name more and more and yet that’s also because of neuroscience and the fact that we work together. You’re in my mind. there are people that I’ve just put posts on Facebook to you and then my friend Scott Aarons calls me up out of the blue and he’s like, hey, I see you talking to Mike. What’s up with that? And he’s all excited. And so I really get the sense that you’re not only helping me, but you’re also helping my friends and my mentors and other people that are important to me. So I want to thank you for helping me maximize my life. And I’m going to let you get ready to spend more time with your family, spend more time with your wife. Basically, ⁓ if you need to work on your book, you can do that because right now we’re wrapping up. Is there anything you’d to say before we-

Mike Vardy: Go. Thanks everybody for listening. And if there’s one thing that you want to do right now to start becoming more productive right away, just start building that capture habit. Get everything out of your head. ⁓ know, remember, your mind is meant to be that factory, not a warehouse. And if you start doing that now, ⁓ you’re going to see some dramatic improvements, ⁓ because again, the goal is to get you know, if you capture everything, you’ll regret nothing. So get it out of your head. and get it down in some place you trust and sooner, soon enough, you’ll have a trusted system. And that’s what you need to be more productive and get the life you really want and get what you want out of life and live a healthy and balanced life. That’s what we want here. That’s what I want for you too.

Michael Scott Eger: I internalize that is write this stuff down, get the clutter out of the brain, and then have a room to dance.

Mike Vardy: Exactly. And I’m not a good dancer. So ⁓ watch me on the dance floor. I don’t care. I have no shame when it comes as long as you get the chance to dance. That’s awesome. Thanks again for having me, Michael. I really appreciate it.

Michael Scott Eger: And once again, with great gratitude and love, thank you for playing a role in my life. Thank you for listening to the Eager to be Healthy podcast. If you liked our show, please give us five stars on iTunes and sign up to become a healthy be at eager to be healthy.com slash podcast. ⁓