It's Labor Day weekend, and even though I've taken the week off to relax, the beginning of September always brings new ideas, thoughts, and energy my way.

One of the new ideas that's come my way that I want to explore is a book from my friend and coach, Mike Vardy, called Productiveness.

His argument: productivity is a machine word, and it's misused when applied to humans.

The term arrived with the factories — measuring output, speed, volume — but it carries a blind spot only you and I can fix:

Productivity will not ask whether the thing you're producing is worth producing at all.

I've heard rumblings of his book, but I don't need to read the full manuscript to know that I have lived in that blind spot. I lived in it — and I often identify my journey with productivity in three stages.

The gut, head, and heart. Here's what each one looked like for me.

🔥 The Gut: Everything Is On Fire

As a new mom working, I ran on urgency. Loud thing? Handled. Louder thing? Handled that instead.

I didn't run my day — my day ran me, similar to a toddler loose in the pots-and-pans cabinet I was raising.

🧠 The Head: "Look, I Made a Spreadsheet"

Then I got strategic. Routines, plans, systems. I felt sort of organized — in a wilted but respectable Type A way.

But somewhere in my "strategery" (thanks, George W. Bush), I noticed I was optimizing my way into carrying things that were never mine to carry. So I learned real delegation.

The head can tell you how to do a thing efficiently. It cannot tell you whether the thing was worth doing at all.

More done. Less chaos. Still — something missing.

💗 The Heart: Where I Actually Found Peace

When I worked with Mike, I started feeling it: most of what I was doing was my responsibility, but something was still off.

Efficient ≠ present, joyful, or bringing the peace I was looking for.

It was then that I saw that I'd expected efficiency to feel the same as presence, peace, and joy — and it didn't. I was disappointed in the lack of feeling that my efficiency brought me. Something about my process of getting things "done" was still off.

And I believe that's the blind spot Vardy names in his book, but I want to find out for sure. I know for a fact you can empty the inbox and still feel you've missed everything that mattered.

Gut gets you moving. Head gets you organized. Only the heart — your why — gets you home.

With awareness, I'm working on choosing the energy I bring to each day, with purpose. Busy stopped being the enemy once it had the who I am underneath it.

So here's a little exercise before we go further. As you look at your own list today, circle (mentally or literally) whichever ones sound like you lately:

A robot checking boxes, not a person having a life. Someone's assistant, but not your own. Always putting out whatever's loudest, never choosing what matters. Efficient, but absent. Short-tempered, running on fumes. A stranger to the people closest to you, because they got your leftover energy.

If you circled more than one — you're not alone, and you're not uncommon. That's just what living in the blind spot looks like. And it's exactly why I want to learn and talk more about this... together.

📖 An Invitation to Learn, Together

You can purchase the book directly from Mike's site: mikevardy.com/bbpc

Let's plan the week you actually have, together. Time Partners, my small-group coaching membership, opens twice a year, in January and July. Join the waitlist here.