Why "Be Consistent!" Advice Doesn't Work
The advice to publish like robots on a content treadmill is not healthy or realistic for many people. Here's a new way to think about productivity.
“You’ve got to be consistent!” productivity experts preach. “Show up every week. Build habits. Never miss twice.”
Consistency is often touted as the key to success for content creators and business owners. Consistency can be beautiful. Julia Cameron is a champion of the daily morning pages. Jerry Seinfeld writes material almost every day, never missing more than one day in a row.
But I keep wondering — does it always apply? Chappell Roan isn’t churning out a new song every week. Miranda July works on projects at length, for years at a time, and shares her creative work blooms on her own timeline. Even network TV releases shows in bursts, not endless streams.
I want to argue that it depends. Are you an artist, a parent, or working a full-time day job? Do your children have special needs? Are you neurodivergent? Context matters. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work for everyone.
So let’s dig in and get a little closer to this idea of consistency:
When and why consistency advice is useful.
How consistency advice becomes dogma and/or falls short
What you need to do to set up a project in a sustainable way.
When it’s worth stepping away to create your own rhythm and path
And what patterns, routines, or ideas you can use instead.
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1. When consistency advice is useful:
Building a business or creating content can be a long game, and the payoff comes from consistently delivering value and fostering relationships. In my experience working with companies and founders, it’s often true that steady, predictable effort has been key to growing businesses, products, and audiences. Consistency can also help your audience know what to expect and builds trust over time.
But it’s important to notice and break down the specific goals that are deeper than setting up a specific routine. The point of the routine is so that you can:
Deliver value
Foster relationships
Grow businesses, products, and audiences
Tell people what to expect
Build trust over time
TIP: A great way to test a goal or an idea is by adding the phrase, “SO THAT,” to the end of it. Mission statement or values seem vague? Add “So that…” and see what comes up.
Get very clear on what your outcome goals are and how you’ll measure it, and then you can build a structure or framework to begin testing. Being consistent is useful advice when:
You have a specific goal, and you want to work towards it — and you need a certain number of data points or repetitions to evaluate the effort.
The work you’re doing benefits from getting a large number of repetitions in, and this high volume of repetitions / consistency will lead to a desired outcome.
You’re setting up a structure or a schedule to stay organized, and having a schedule helps you deliver on a project.
You want to develop a regular habit or relationship with your audience, who is learning what to expect from you.
Consistenty advice is also very helpful if you want to build a personal habit or practice routine.
The problem, however, is when we take consistency too far, and it becomes rigid or inflexible, especially when it’s detrimental to the humans or the project.
2. Consistency advice is too often wrapped up in culture of “productivity propaganda”
The problem with a lot of ‘consistency’ advice, however, is that it’s wrapped up with a more toxic brand of hustle culture, which focuses on productivity in excess, and finding ways to maximize every square inch of your time.
Rahaf Harfoush, a futurist and strategist who writes about technology and digital culture, calls this brand of advice “productivity propaganda,” and explains it as “social media posts that continue to promote a toxic narrative that tells people they are constantly not doing enough.” Propaganda is generaly defined as the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.
When the idea of consistency is interpreted as rigid all-or-nothing thinking, it can become exhaustive. It pushes people and organizations to produce as much as you possibly can at max capacity. There’s a lacing of shame in all of it, which is often weaponized to tell people to work harder, produce more, and to be dedicated in a way that may be unsustainable. It also impies that it’s the individual’s fault if they can’t keep up.
Pushing consistency above rest, life, and health is when consistency advice turns into productivity propaganda.
This hyper-drive for productivity at all costs has shadow sides. It can minimize people’s very real sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, and it insults people and blames them for not being organized enough. Rather than be honest about the challenge, it diminishes people’s experiences, leading to failure rather than creative problem-solving.
When advice to stay consistent and celebrates pursuit over and above life, health, and wellness, then it’s gone too far. Implicit in this version of “consistency” is the idea that if you miss once, then you’re hosed. It sets people up for burnout when they take on too much too fast. Then, life happens — life always happens — and you miss a day and you don’t have a plan for how to return.
“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s an indication of a need to pause, rest, and recharge,” Harfoush says. I’d also add that it’s a sign that the system you signed up for is too much, and redesigning the system to fit your life is more important than trying to chase someone else’s brand of productivity.
Redesigning the system to fit your life is more important than trying to chase someone else’s brand of productivity.
3. Where consistency advice breaks down:
A lot of mainstream productivity advice comes with the baked-in assumption that you, the individual, have agency and control of your time. The underbelly is a set of assumptions about what you ‘should’ be capable of.
Perfect consistency assumes that:
You have complete control over your time and energy,
If you don’t meet rigorous deadlines, it’s a personal failure—there’s something wrong with you for not being organized or dedicated enough,
It doesn’t address or acknowledge the necessity of rest,
It promotes the culture of overwork that is relentless in pushing people to consume more, create more, and maximize value at every opportunity.
You can behave and operate like a robot!
In addition, this version of productivity advice is often only accessible to a small fraction of people — it doesn’t apply as readily to folks with caretaking responsibilities, with neurodivergent minds, with different ways of thinking or being, or without agency and control over their schedule and time.
SOME COMMON EXAMPLES
Let’s look at a few examples where rigidity has surpassed consistency:
The Content Treadmill — Publishing new content every week without any scheduled breaks, ever, year over year.
Social Media Domination — Being on social media every single day, multiple times per day, as a single operator or small business.
Pushing Beyond Limits — Pushing yourself to create new creative work every week, even when you’re feeling burned out, exhausted, or when your support structures are absent.
Not Acknowledging Life — Insisting on creating and producing at the same level throughout major life events, like pregnancy and childbirth, because of the toxic messaging that you can have it all, do it all, and that pregnancy and children shouldn’t affect you or change you. (What!? Why do we think like this? It’s absurd.)
SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO INSTEAD?
Redesigning your productivity system to fit your life is more important than trying to chase perfection, or someone else’s brand of productivity. If you’ve ever started a new routine or habit just to get waylaid or backlogged and quit in frustration, you’re not alone.
Perhaps the system you set up was too rigid and inflexible and needs to be thoughtfully re-designed. It might not be that you failed, but that the structure failed you.
The key here is to look at your goals and review whether or not consistency is helping you, or if it’s become harmful or restrictive to you in any way. This might seem obvious to say, but if it pushes you beyond your capacity, it’s too much.
4. Redesign consistency goals to have more flexibility and space — and so they work for you.
The key is to be creative and flexible in designing a structure that works for you and your capacity. Consistency goals that allow room for failure, flexibility, and regular breaks work far better than rigid, inflexible structures. Here’s how:
CONSISTENCY DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN RIGIDITY.
You are allowed to ebb and flow, and to take multiple breaks within a project’s scope.
James Clear writes a limited number of new research articles per year. During the years he was writing a book, he wrote far fewer new articles. He had a consistent writing practice, but didn’t publish the same amount every year.
Vanessa Van Edwards runs aYouTube channel and publishes around three new YouTube videos each month, reserving the fourth and fifth weeks for rest and re-runs. She has over a million subscribers.
I hosted a weekly podcast for entrepreneurial parents for five years, while also taking multiple months-long breaks. Each time I took a break to focus on a separate creative project, I told my audience what to expect, regularly taking 2-3 months to deep dive into writing or other building work.
WORD FROM THE WISE: Never start a project that has an indefinite promise! It rarely works, and often peters out. Create an ideal outcome or ending, and plan for how you’ll stop the project.
ADD HEALTHY STRUCTURE TO PROJECTS
If you’re starting a new project, instead of signing up for an unlimited number of runs, set parameters for how many episodes, articles, or creative pieces you’ll produce, and do a limited number of runs and see how it goes. This is very similar to television, which will scope a pilot episode, record a limited series, and then see how the audience response is before renewing for a second season.
Do this when structuring a project:
Your project or process must have an end date.
Define what makes the project complete.
It must have an allowance for breaks.
It needs to have a path for re-starting after a stall.
Get clear on when and how you will celebrate success.
TIP: It’s far better to create smaller projects with a higher chance of success, because then you’ll be building momentum with each iteration. Keep whittling down the scope and breaking projects down into smaller parts.
THINK IN SEASONS AND BATCHES
Seasons instead of treadmills. Many folks can’t sustain a podcast, newsletter, blog, client outreach, and other parts of business all at the same time. Consider allocating specific seasons to projects. Many podcasts, for example, are seasonal. They are still “consistent” even with a long break in between seasons.
Think in batches or sprints. Perhaps consistency doesn’t even feel right to you as a creator, artist, or worker. Some neurodivergent people I know find a daily word count to be an absolute boredom. So some writers use long weekends to churn out huge waves of content in sprints, and then return to daily life and produce very little in between.
Plan for seasonal variation to respond to life and business. Got a business that works overdrive around the holidays? Plan ahead to take a break from other non-necessary projects during that season.
ALLOW ROOM FOR ADAPTATION + CHANGE
I work with so many parents who try to sustain the breakneck pace they had before they added kids to their lives. “I can’t keep up,” they tell me. Y’all. Of course we can’t keep up. We’re keeping people alive. Our lives have changed.
Find the right rhythm for your business in this season. It’s okay to change the way you work when everything in your life has changed.
Reduce the quantity or frequency of your project. Go to 1x a month if that’s what you can sustain right now. Don’t do daily or weekly; do the rate that really works. If you’re missing lots of days, you might be pushing too hard.
Instead of quitting altogether, try a slower pace. Update your schedule to reflect the realities of what you can sustain.
MAKE TAKING BREAKS PART OF THE DESIGN
Consistency doesn’t mean staying on the content treadmill forever until you die, although that’s often how people start a project, by signing up for an indefinite amount of time. Instead, put more structure into your breaks and time away — the same way you do for the project.
Build in “skip” weeks as part of the process. Plan floating “skip” weeks every month, or a set period at a regular cadence when you will stop working.
Build in recurring, habitual breaks. Some creators I know skip full months in July and February. Other folks take two weeks in August and two weeks in December off. Some take the summer off.
Lean on reruns and repurposing. Recycle material. I work with a writing team that takes my past podcasts and turns them into new blog posts for me. I also frequently re-use snippets of my best stuff, or re-broadcast past content that didn’t get seen much in the early days. Go back to your earliest social media posts, guest essays, or email blasts and see what you can re-use.
Flip consistency on it’s head and focus on taking consistent breaks.
5. TL/DR — You can be consistent [AND] consistently take breaks.
Design a structure that works for you and your goals.
Sprints can be useful.
Repetitions can be key for growth and evolution.
But jumping onto a never-ending content treadmill, pursuing relentless churn above all other life demands? This is not sustainable. Don’t let the productivity propaganda machine convince you to drown. If you’re setting a project scope that includes unlimited publishing with a rigid, inflexible time table, warning lights should start flashing.
The alternative: Bring more creativity, flexibility, and recovery periods into the structure of your goals. When you design for rest and resilience from the outset, you’re more likely to stay the course and hit your goals.
— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent
This piece was repurposed from a guest post I did for the team over at Productive Flourishing. Charlie Gilkey asked me if I’d write pen a piece about hustle culture and flexibility, and I deeply believe that you can be consistent AND consistently take breaks. I wrote about five different ways to creatively re-think consistency and how to show up in your business when life is chaotic or unpredictable. →
This is great. Super affirming. Echoes a lot of principles I follow as a parent of 3 young kiddos running my own business. Thanks for spending the time and energy to organize and think through this and share it with the world.
Well done, Sarah! This advice speaks to me as a Highly Sensitive Person who's also a parent AND works full-time in addition to publishing on Substack. ✌️