Achieve Consistency with These 7 Proven Strategies
Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash
Does consistency elude you?
I’ve been publishing an article a week, consistently, for over 6 years; it’s something I do with religiosity.
And yet, I also take a lot of time off (12 weeks last year!), have spent time recovering from cancer, am currently experimenting with a 4-day work week, and I have a very full schedule of client coaching sessions and speaking gig.
I don’t say this to brag; I promise.
I’m sharing this for context because people often ask me how I’m so consistent; how I’ve never missed a week.
I don’t have a secret consistency superpower; rather, anyone can do something consistently if they have the desire to.
Including you!
And I want to share with you the strategies I use to make it happen.
Now, you? Well, writing might not be your thing.
But I bet you have SOMETHING that you’ve struggled to be consistent with.
Writing, for me, falls into the camp of “important but not urgent”. Nothing truly bad is going to happen if I don’t publish for a week, or 5.
Making time for the important but not urgent is often one of the biggest struggles folks come in with when we start working together.
So, as I share with you the strategies below, I want you to just replace “writing” with whatever that thing is that you’re trying to be more consistent about.
Maybe for you, it’s:
Strategic thinking time
Reading
Exercise
Hobbies
Learning new skills
Staying up to date on your industry (reading articles, etc.)
Or something else entirely
So, whatever that thing is for you, the thing you tell yourself you want to do consistently, but aren’t yet doing consistently, here are a variety of strategies that I use that might just work for you, too:
Batch process
I didn’t always do this, but I certainly do now. In fact, I’m literally doing it right now. Whenever I’m on a plane, I make sure to set my Google docs to “offline access” and I draft as many articles as I can, until I don’t feel like writing anymore. (I don’t set an arbitrary goal; I just start writing and stop when I feel “done”.)
If I don’t have any flights coming up, then I’ll block a ½ day in my calendar every once in a while for drafting.
This way, when I sit down to edit and publish, I’m already 75% of the way there, and the barrier to actually publishing is so much lower.
Additionally, if I’m going to be on vacation or out of the office for some other reason, I’ll batch publish. When I took a sabbatical last year, I pre-scheduled 7 weeks of articles to be dripped out while I was gone.
Protect the time early in the week and early in the day
The first thing I do every Monday morning, even before I’ve processed email, is to edit and publish an article.
If you have something important that you want to do, the later you leave it in the day, or even the week, the more likely you are to give in to the tyranny of the (seemingly) urgent, and make exceptions to your goal.
Plan/schedule in advance
See above. The time to publish is built into my schedule. It’s planned for.
I don’t leave it up to chance and hope I’ll have time; I include it in my plans as a non-negotiable.
If you’ve ever heard the parable about making sure you put the “big rocks” into the jar first, and then the pebbles and then the sand, because if you do the opposite, you’ll only have room for sand, well, this is a “big rock” for me.
Processize
I have a checklist for the steps required to get an article from idea to published.
I follow the steps and therefore don’t need to recreate the wheel every week.
Resist perfectionism
If you wait for something to be perfect, you’ll never get it out into the world.
It’s basically guaranteed that this post will have a typo in it, even though I’ve proofread it multiple times. (And don’t you worry, because I’ll hear about it…from my Dad. And then I’ll go fix it.)
If you struggle with knowing when to stop, or knowing what’s “good enough”, try giving yourself a time limit. Personally, I limit myself to 90 minutes on Monday mornings to edit an article, film a related Youtube video and a short video for Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok (and no, sorry, you won’t see me dancing here!)
When the 90 minutes are done, I hit publish on all of it.
Repurpose from time to time (holidays)
Every once in a while, I’ll repost a relevant article.
I tend to do this around the winter holidays because that content is relevant at the same time every year.
Keep an idea log
Don’t start from nothing!
I have a “blog post idea backlog” spreadsheet; it has over 500 ideas on it, and it keeps on growing.
Every time I think of something I’d like to write about, I add it to the list. That way, I’m never starting with nothing.
How can you apply this concept?:
Want to make time for reading?
Keep a list of all the books that you want to read, that you hear about, or that others recommend to you.
Want to make time for research?
Keep a list of articles, research journals, etc., so that you’re not wasting the precious time you set aside just looking for something that fits into the category.
Exercise?
Make a plan of what you’ll do when the time comes.