Consistency

Part of the reason I’m writing these little journal entries is because I’m curious about what other people think and how their lives go. My diligence, consistency and effort comes and goes in waves. There are days when I wake up and I clean and I organise and I cook healthy food and I work hard and I’m very productive. Then there are days when I just struggle to do anything at all. There are days when I’m proud of myself for going to bed on time. Conversely, there are days where I’ve already accomplished so much by 9:00am I almost can’t believe it myself.

Is this a normal experience? Is this the way most people are? Some days they feel great and everything seems to go well and then other days they wake up and everything is just an ongoing disaster? I look at how much conversation there is about consistency and how difficult it is to be consistent. One of the things you’ll find plenty of times on the Internet is the idea that if you can do something for 100 consecutive days then you’re well ahead of the crowd.

I freely admit I find it very difficult to do anything consecutively for 100 days, including brushing my teeth, which is a 4 minutes a day task. One of the things I have learned about consistency is it requires very careful planning. Being consistent when everything is as it ought to be or as you expect it to be is easy. When your day follows the normal routine, when the people around you are supportive and understand what your routine is. Consistency becomes difficult when something unusual happens.

For a long time I went into an office twice a week. Getting there at a sensible time meant leaving sometime between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning. That meant for two of the working days each week my morning routine essentially didn’t exist. I didn’t have the opportunity to get up and have a coffee and think carefully about the day ahead. I didn’t have time to make myself scrambled eggs with two pieces of bacon and half an avocado. That introduced a sort of gap to my routine. Let’s say I go for a run every day at 06:00, suddenly that’s something that I can only do five days a week. Finding a way to be consistent with an activity like running for 35 minutes is really challenging. At least for me.

I’m beginning to think consistency is less about emotions or motivation and much more about very careful planning and exception management. Project delivery and programme delivery is much more about very careful planning and exception management too. After all, the things which derail projects aren’t when everything goes to plan it’s when things come along to derail your plan and recovering from those things is very difficult when you are not ready.

I read somewhere an interruption takes you about 25 to 30 minutes to recover from. If you are working on something, making good progress and the telephone rings or someone knocks on the door it can take a very long time for you to work your way mentally back to what it was that you were doing. This is certainly my experience. This morning when I woke up I looked around myself and I realised my space could be cleaner and better organised. The shelves to my right are a little cluttered and they’re not laid out in a useful and logical manner. There are things on them I’m not going to need for months like my blood pressure monitor(why do I need to have that out?). There are other things like my camera and headphones which I use regularly.

The mess continues into the digital realm where I have many files and folders and half-completed documents all the way through my digital spaces. I think one of the things I should try to do is allocate a small amount of time everyday to tackling the clutter and disorganisation in my life. Even 15 minutes, just to take the time to clean something up, to organise something, to consider carefully whether or not I need some pictures or files would really make a big difference as that time aggregates.

This is one of the lessons to come from writing consistently. As I glance towards the bottom of the screen Word tells me I’ve written 82,548 words. I didn’t sit down and write those in a single sitting. Instead, over a period of months I’ve sat down more often than not and I’ve used the keyboard or my microphone to get words captured for that day. Hmm, perhaps I should also spend some time reading these entries too. To remind myself about how I felt at different times.

I think today is going to be a great day.