#45: Consistency is important, but what is it?
You know you're supposed to be consistent with your writing routine. But how do you manage this, when so much of what goes into writing is so vague and unquantifiable? How do you factor in things like thinking time and discussing time and skim reading the intros of articles you won't end up using? Here's your imperfect friend to help you out. Consistency, believe it or not, looks nothing like you think it looks like. It doesn't involve willpowering through the hard days. It doesn't mean doing the same thing every day. Sometimes it means jacking in the writing and taking a break. Your passport to progress doesn't need to involve blood, sweat, and tears. Gather round the virtual campfire and all will become clear.
Episode transcript:
Consistency can sometimes look pretty inconsistent.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
You know that consistency is important when it comes to a writing routine, right? You know that x number of words every day is better than a feast and famine approach where you knock out 3000 words one day and then don’t even think about the project for 3 weeks. It’s consistency that’s going to get you where you want to be. Habits are the keys to achieving your goals. We all know this stuff, even if we’re not always great at implementing it.
But what is consistency, really? What, exactly, is it that we should be aiming for? Sometimes, this question seems pretty straightforward, especially when the goals we’re working towards can be broken down into easily quantifiable little steps. If you’ve got ten days to mark 150 essays, then you mark 15 each day. Simple. Other times, it’s not so simple. If you have four months to write a 4000-word article, then it’s not necessarily the best approach to write 1000 words a month. You need to factor in reading time, writing time, thinking time, and all the rest of it - and all that is much less quantifiable. Writing often comes in fits and starts even for people who are really dedicated to taking a consistent approach. Sometimes our thought kind of reaches a critical mass, and then after weeks or months of puzzling over something, we suddenly find ourselves able to dash off a few thousand words in an afternoon. (I mean, not me personally. But maybe you, or maybe someone you know. We all know people like that.) So, for researchers, and for other people working towards goals that don’t really have obvious, quantifiable steps, what does consistency mean? And how do we think about it in a way that is helpful in enabling us to make solid, steady progress towards whatever it is that we want to achieve?
Well, the first thing I want to say about this is that even when you’re working on a project where it’s not clear what exactly you should be doing every day in order to be consistent, your intuitions about what consistent work looks like are probably far clearer than you think. Let’s take an example. Suppose you’ve committed to writing a 7000-word article on a particular general topic six months from now. You don’t currently have a specific title or question you want to address in your article, and so some of the work towards that goal is going to involve thinking about what you want to write about, exploring different areas, some of which are going to turn out to be dead ends, reading stuff that you might end up not using, and so on. If you want to work consistently on a project like this, then at least in the early days, what consistency means is probably going to be something pretty vague and unverifiable like ‘think about this project for 30 minutes each day’. Pretty hopeless as a daily target, right?
Well, maybe, but maybe not. I mean, you’ve been around the block a few times, and I’ll bet you have a pretty good grasp of what honest, well-intentioned ‘thinking about the project for 30 minutes each day’ looks like, and how it differs from ‘taking the piss and scrolling through instagram while pretending that you’re going to start thinking about the project now in a minute, just as soon as you’ve watched this next cute video of an unexpected friendship between a three-legged kitten and an orphaned alligator’. The problem is that it’s not an either/or choice between these two activities: they’re at opposite ends of a spectrum, and you’re concerned that setting yourself an intangible, unquantifiable sort of target like ‘think about the project for 30 minutes each day’ risks you sliding gradually into faffing about for 30 minutes every day and getting nothing done, even if you start out with good intentions. Now, I’m going to have more to say about this example later - but for now, let’s note that when we think about setting intentions like this, most of us have concerns like, ‘It would be really hard to stick to something like this without really strong willpower’.
Ah. Willpower. Now, there’s a big problem when we start to think in terms of willpower. If we’re aiming for consistency, we can’t be relying on willpower. Willpower is a finite resource that gets depleted when we use it, and which needs to be replenished before we can use it again. It’s what gets us turning up at the gym every day for the first two weeks of January, and then never going again. It’s what has people sticking to their healthy eating regime for four days and then losing interest and ordering a pizza. Willpower lets us down. It’s fine for getting stuff done in the short term - pulling an all-nighter to meet a deadline, that sort of thing - but not for longer term goals, because it runs out, it gets weaker over time, and eventually lets us down. Consistency, on the other hand, means doing something again and again, every day, showing up without fail, putting in as much on day 100 as you did on day 1. Consistency is not what you get by exercising willpower. If you want consistency, it needs to be effortless. If you want consistency in your writing regime (or in anything else you do), you need to make it less like joining a gym in January and more like brushing your teeth every night. You know, something you just do. And something that, by doing one day, or one week, or one month, you don’t deplete your commitment to do it the next day, week, or month. What does that look like, for a researcher?
Well, I got to thinking about this when I was listening to an episode of The Runner’s World UK podcast. You might have noticed, by now, that I quite like an analogy between running and writing. So, I was listening to an episode that featured an interview with the ultra runner and running coach Damian Hall. He was talking about consistency in training, and he kept returning to the idea of ‘thinking of the bigger picture’. Here’s a quote. He said, ‘It sounds almost counterintuitive because if you want consistency you could be forgiven for thinking “oh I must get out and do what I’m told like that’s consistency” but I actually think it’s the opposite of that, I think it’s going “actually today’s not the day for my intervals” … Always think of consistency, what’s going to help you run better tomorrow or next week’. End of quote. (I realised a few episodes ago that I need to get better at letting you know when I’ve finished quoting.)
This, I think, is a fascinating approach. According to Hall, doing what you’re supposed to be doing every day, without fail, is not consistency. For us writers, that means that maybe getting down x number of words or spending x number of hours reading articles isn’t consistency. Why not? Well, let’s revisit what he said at the end of that bit I quoted: ‘always think of … what’s going to help you run better tomorrow or next week.’ And I think that bit is something we often miss when we’re hell bent on hitting our daily writing targets. Some days, as you’ll be painfully aware, hitting our daily word count (and I’m deliberately avoiding putting a figure on that because whatever I say, I’d manage to stress some of you out) - hitting our daily word count can be like squeezing blood out of a stone. If we manage it on one of those days, we collapse in a depleted heap, and hopefully congratulate ourselves and celebrate our little win. But what about the next day? Do we tackle the next day’s writing target with renewed vigour and enthusiasm? Perhaps some do, but many don’t. For many of us, we’re still reeling from the herculean effort we made the previous day, and we end up viewing the prospect of doing it all again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, with dismay. There’s no way we can keep it up for weeks or months. When we get the work done, it’s a result of our relying on willpower - doing the writing despite not wanting to do it - and that’s not the route to consistency. So, what can we do instead?
Taking Hall’s advice, we can take a longer-term view - or, ‘think of the bigger picture’, as he puts it. If you’re trying to work towards a particular medium- or long-term goal today - by which I mean something that you hope to realise weeks or months from now, rather than hours - how is the way you work towards that goal today going to affect the way you work towards it tomorrow, or next week, or next month? I mean, sure, you can grit your teeth and bend over backwards squeezing out the words today, and you can feel some satisfaction from hitting today’s target - but where is that going to leave you tomorrow, when you return to the laptop? That dopamine hit you get from meeting your daily target today is going to end up coming at a pretty high price if tomorrow you end up feeling like you just can’t face any more writing and open Instagram instead. So, what can you do? When it comes to running, Damian Hall advocates just postponing the hard stuff - the intervals or the long run - until another day, and taking a rest day instead. Is that something we researchers should be doing too? What if we never feel like returning to our writing - what then?
I have a couple of pieces of advice here. The first is this. If you think it’s a real possibility that, unless you force yourself to do some writing, you’ll never do it, then something has gone wrong. Anxiety is involved, probably. Because this never used to be the way you approached the subject you once loved. I have a few episodes that might help you here. One is episode #40: Why I took so bloody wrong to write my book, in which I share my experience of simply not wanting to work on the very project that I had chosen because I was so interested in it. Another is episode #33: I'm supposed to be doing what I love - what's gone wrong? where I talked about how external pressures - like the expectations your employer or supervisor has of you - can kill your motivation to work on what you love, and what you can do about it. In essence, if you’re thinking ‘But I never want to work on this ever again’, then you have a problem that you’re not going to solve by willpowering through it. You need to take a look under the bonnet (or the ‘hood’ for my American listeners) and work out what’s going on underneath that reluctance. Don’t worry - this problem is completely fixable. But you won’t do yourself any favours by pretending that it’s not there.
And here’s my second piece of advice. Let’s return to the example I described earlier, in which we shy away from giving ourselves daily goals like ‘think about this project for 30 minutes a day’ because we just know that without a more quantifiable target we’ll end up just faffing around during that time instead. Now, let’s start by acknowledging that this is a real problem. It is better if our goals are quantifiable - if there’s something concrete that achieving them looks like. Number of words on the page, number of essays marked, application submitted, email sent - those sorts of things. But sometimes it really is difficult to get that. A lot of what we need to do as researchers is just sitting around thinking - I talked about this in episodes #19 and #20 - and we do ourselves a disservice if we disregard that. And the point I want to make next is related to this. Often, when we do sit around thinking about a writing project we’re working on, we give ourselves a hard time if we don’t come up with any amazing insight at the end of it. We say to ourselves things like, ‘Ugh, what I’ve just done is no better than if I’d spent the time looking at Twitter or drinking wine or taking a nap’. When, in fact, the time we spent thinking about the project could have been useful in all sorts of non-obvious ways - it might move us a bit further towards an insight that we’ll make two days from now, or it might simply give us a better sense of the geography of the area, so that we understand better than we did that a particular set of issues is a bit of a dead end. Believe it or not, looking for the positives in a seemingly unproductive session is important. I know many of you - including countless clients I’ve discussed this with - think that being mean to yourself is the best way to motivate yourself to work harder, and that making an effort to look for positives is a bad idea because it will make you feel complacent and stop you working hard. But, actually, that’s misguided. Getting better at identifying positive outcomes and little bits of progress in those nebulous, intangible, difficult-to-quantify sessions of thinking about your research is crucial, exactly because progress in those sessions is nebulous, intangible, and difficult to quantify. Sometimes, being able to think things like ‘Thanks to today’s session I understand concept X a bit better than I did’, or ‘Because of the thinking I did today I now realise that I need to read Y tomorrow instead of Z as I originally planned’ - sometimes insights like these are all we have by way of articulating what we got from a session. When we write off those frustrating sessions as no better than scrolling through Buzzfeed, we willfully prevent ourselves from making progress. Because if puzzling over a research problem for 30 minutes is no better than taking a Buzzfeed quiz to find out what citrus fruit represents our romantic life, then we may as well do the Buzzfeed quiz, right? Far more fun. So. Practise seeing the positive value of your more frustrating work sessions. That’s the way to gain more insight into the way you work, and to see more positives in the future.
Circling back to the topic of consistency, what we get is this. Some days, you might have planned to write a certain number of words, but realise it’s not really happening for you. Instead of forcing yourself to get those words down, thereby depleting your willpower and making things more difficult for yourself tomorrow, perhaps you can try another way to make progress instead. That could involve going for a coffee with a colleague and talking about your project. Or it could involve skim-reading a few articles as you work out where to go next. Or taking a walk and allowing your mind to wander - something that’s a really important step in developing your ideas, as I’ve talked about in previous episodes. Or maybe just calling it a day, taking a break, and returning to it tomorrow refreshed. Now, none of these activities are going to give you the satisfying dopamine hit that you get from hitting a quantifiable target, like a word target. But they can be an important part of consistent progress even so - and by writing them off as ‘just as bad as pottering about on the internet’ you prevent yourself from reaping the benefits of them, and you prevent yourself from seeing what a consistent routine realistically looks like for you. If you do that, then you end up in a situation where you’re either bashing out the words or you’re doing nothing useful. It’s hard to develop a consistent approach to your writing with that framework in mind. On that framework, consistency is just producing words, and you have nowhere to go when the words aren’t coming. There’s nothing you can do, in those circumstances, except fail. You can make progress towards your goal much easier and even faster than that. You can make it so that, on days when the words aren’t coming, you do something else. You read, or think, or just take a break and try again tomorrow. You can cope with doing less today because you know that you’re more likely to get something done tomorrow than you would be if you tried to force your way through it. Take a moment to think about what a consistent routine might look like for you. What does it involve other than getting the words down on the page? What does it need to be like, realistically, to be something you can make progress on without relying on heroic bursts of willpower?
Good luck, friends. And happy doing whatever-it-is-you-need-to-be-doing to realise your goals.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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