“Consistency is Key,” we are advised, over and over again, by diet experts, Anne Lamott, Stephan King, Ernest Hemingway, by writing coaches, and by any advisor about achieving any goal.
All right already, we get it. Be consistent, if you ever want anything out of life. If you want to finish a book…
Consistency may or may not be part of your creative makeup. I tend to thrive in chaos, and I love utter flexibility. But wait… I also have goals I want to achieve. So, what’s a gal to do?
I’ve created an idea that suits my pesky inner Rebel: Intermittent Consistency.
Intermittent Consistency is my kind of commitment.
I have recently realized that my inner Rebel throws a destructive little fit in whenever I try to make a dire commitment. If I even say the word “diet,” I’m eating cookies before the end of the word. Why? To prove to my inner Dictator, “you’re not the boss of me.” If I plan to write daily, I end up playing solitaire way longer than usual. Again, why? “I don’t wanna… I don’t hafta…” And once I do those irrational things, against my fully rational desires and goals, my inner Namecaller has a free-for-all.
How’s your inner Rebel? Mine’s a beast.
So, as of now, I’m engaged in intermittent consistency. If I want to write/finish/edit a book, I have to do it permissively. I give myself a lot of latitude. I never have to do any of it. But that can lead to long lag times between bursts of productivity, and weeks can turn into months even years.
Intermittent consistency is how I create a track. I can go off track all I want. It is always there for me. (Permissiveness). But when I want to chug along, the track is also there for me. I can get right back on.
My Intermittent Consistency plan is to write Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour. Not every day. Not for four hours. Just a track I can get back on two times a week and always make some progress. Eventually, I reconnect with the material and end up working into the night, or straight through other obligations. When I have a track, and an expectation of Intermittent Consistency, even my inner Rebel can get on board.
Woot! Woot!
We all spend tons of ink on productivity and procrastination, as if we each have the same problems, or the same toolkit in our mental make-up. What works for me may not work for you. What works “on paper” – consistency discipline and hard work – could backfire in my mind, and create resistance that, in effect, is the same as procrastinating.
You have to know how your brain works and how you have to talk with it to achieve your goals. And you have to not take advice that works for others and use it as a club to beat yourself up with.
P.S. I’m also eating very low cal/low carb, two days a week. I hope it means that I’ll slowly but surely lose weight. (I also hope my inner Rebel didn’t hear that word, since this is a low-cal day.) I definitely like being allowed to NOT diET most of the time. And I definitely hope this track will work for me when nothing else really has.
It is a track I’m laying, and I’m banking on Intermittent Consistency to make my life my own fun, flexible festival I like it to be, while slowly in the background, achieving my goals.