Everywhere you turn, you’ll hear it: “stay consistent to achieve success.” Do a 100 day coding challenge to quickly boost your programming skills. Post 90 reels for 90 days on Instagram to kick-start your follower count. Exercise for 1 hour each day for the next 6 months and lose 20 pounds.

100 Day Recession Code Challenge

None of what we just mentioned is bad advice. You know what to do. So why can’t you do it?

The Mindset Shift is More Difficult Than Anticipated

Most of us underestimate how much 90 days actually is. How many times have you heard yourself say, “starting next week, I’ll exercise each day for the next year.” That’s a really long time to be consistent.

I struggle with it constantly. I have a primary job, create content for multiple Instagram and YouTube accounts, and write articles, each day. It’s nearly 10:00pm EST and I’m working on this one. By the time I’m done, it’ll be close to tomorrow and I would have nearly missed a day. Why do I flirt with “disaster?”

Being consistent for an extended period of time is mentally draining. If you think that you can only be burnt-out at your primary job, you’re wrong. You can get burnt-out from anything, even the things that you’re having fun with.

The Root of Burnout is Not Multitasking: It’s Being Told to Shift Priorities

Having the will-power to keep pushing even when you just want to get some sleep is the mindset shift that you have to embrace.

How I Keep Consistent

Organization. Having a routine is important for success. Each day, I open up my Jira board and walk through all of my other boards, checking off one thing at a time until I’m done. The more I do in the morning, the free’er my day will be later in the afternoon.

How to be Aggressively Organized?

And yet, here we are. Writing an article at 10:15pm to make sure that I can check that last checkbox. Today I had a partial excuse. I was preparing most of the day for a board meeting tomorrow and spent the afternoon laying out pine-straw around the house (it had to get done too).

For content creation, I try to record in bulk. Batch-content creation is something that can be done when you’ve planned and organized yourself mercilessly.

How to Post Quality Content to Social Media Daily?

For other tasks, like writing code or practicing the guitar, I set a minimum daily time. Each of these have a 30+ minute routine inscribed on my Jira board. Since I like to keep pushing boundaries, sometimes I’ll need to adjust down. For example, reading a book for 1+ hours per day was a little excessive with my schedule, so I pushed it down to 10+ pages per day. This gives me an out for those burnt-out days.

I also have a few printed calendars, 10 to be exact, where I highlight the days for that topic each time that I complete it. For example, on my Think.Dino Instagram channel, I highlight each day that I post a reel. I ran out of content today and needed to start fresh. I didn’t get a chance to batch record, so I created a quick video and posted it on the next topic. How did I pick the next topic? That was already organized in my Jira board.

For even more challenging tasks, like exercise, I’ve found out that the only way that I can keep consistent is by taking it easy. I have a tendency of overdoing it and will either get injured or get so exhausted that it will affect my other tasks that I’m trying to be consistent at as well.

Tips For Consistency

Start off small. Pick one thing that you know that you can be consistent at for the next 30 days and log each day that you’re consistent. That will help prime you for you next challenges. You’re really just training your mind to keep a daily routine and to log your activities.

Once you have your first 30 days completed with your task, you can start making incremental improvements to it. This can be as simple of a task as you want, like drinking water. Drink at least a bottle of water each day for the next 30 days and once you’re done, up it to 2 bottles for the next 30 days.

Start incorporating more challenging tasks. This could be walking each day for the next 30 days. The improvement after 30 days could be that now you can set a minimum time, like 30+ minutes or 5,000 steps.

Keep talking to yourself. Fight the urge to quit. It’s just for 30 days. Each time that you stop for a day, you’ll need to restart. Unfortunately, most of us stop completely. That’s why it’s extremely important to fight the urge to quit no matter what (I mean there are always exceptions but don’t allow yourself to succumb to your excuses).

If you do miss a day, understand that you didn’t fail. Start over and repeat the process, but don’t stop. And try to get back to it as quickly as possible.

Fin

I hope that this motivates you to stay consistent. I know it motivated me. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to keep writing. At first I wanted to end it after the first couple of paragraphs, and yet here we are, at the bottom of the article, with plenty of time to spare. Let me cross this day off my calendar as well.