How to Measure Consistency for The Impatient Being?

Repetition is the best learning mechanism to feed your brain about what is essential. The initial learning phase is tedious because of this feature only.

Your mind cannot judge what is crucial unless you expose it to the same activity multiple times.

Whenever you see a new task, your brain has safety mechanisms to keep you in the comfort zone, some of them are the fight-or-flight response (sympathetic nervous system), procrastination, self-doubt, etc. It forces us to take simple steps that we might think are beneficial because they make us “comfortable” for the time being.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the one which keeps us calm in the fight-or-flight kind of situations. If we know how to activate it, then we will handle every task with ease. It also ensures the learning process is smooth, and the learning curve feels gentle.

Why is consistency important in starting?

You want to develop a new habit, and you want to stick to it. After you have mastered it, it will become second nature, but you have to train your brain for it.

When we try to learn new things, our neurons try to make connections called synapses. Repetition of a specific activity strengthens these connections. After the learning phase, the operation goes on auto-pilot and the work which we took 2 hours to finish in the initial period will now take a lot less to complete, say 30 minutes.

That’s what happened to my writing now. I used to spend around 2 hours every day on the computer to come with a first draft, edit, publish and share on all the platforms where I am active. But since I spent that 2 hours every day for almost three weeks, now I finish the tasks even faster. It required a lot of patience, I’ll tell you.

Today I finished this article in 18 minutes! The next metric is what brought me to this speed at present.

Momentum is a metric you can track easily.

Showing up even on the worst day instils confidence that you have what it takes to sail through hard times because that will be a motivation for you whenever lethargy kicks in.

I experienced the writer’s block only once in my life. My writing schedule stretched that day. I wanted to punch the negativity in its face, and that’s how I wrote the blog on how to recover from the writer’s block.

Some say creativity block is not a real thing; some say it is a nerve-wracking experience. But this experience is subjective. It depends on how seriously you take it and what recovery measures you have at hand.

Think of it as a learning experience that will lift you from the valley, and the momentum will be in your mind forever. It is an achievement worth celebrating every time!

Measure it often but not every day!

I set long term goals to measure the compounding effect of consistency. Set it once, forget about it, and focus on the process. During the entire journey, I don’t want any metrics to distract my concentration, so I don’t pay attention to them at all.

Followers, claps and private notes for Medium articles are a positive sign that I am going in the right direction. I do interact with them whenever they pop up, but I don’t have to check on them frequently. Medium gives the notifications, and I check them on my schedule. I made new connections in the past month because of it!

The metrics which I avoid in the journey are the numerical statistics of every story that keep changing every day. I am a data analyst and prefer to study things the way they are most informative. That is why I have decided to analyse my statistics after day100 to see what areas I can improve.

It is about the sample size. If you create on diverse topics, and I mean, you create a lot to gain a broad perspective, analysing your work will give a trustable insight into your performance.

Takeaways

If consistency sounds boring, it is because your brain is trying hard to develop the synapses in the initial learning phase. Once the brain makes new synapses through momentum fueled by consistency, you will become a master at the new habit. Then soon, it will become a part of your lifestyle. Cheers!

This blog belongs to a series of posts I am publishing in this 100-days streak. Navigate to the end of article 22, for the references from day 23 onwards. If you would like to read the books before day 22, this is the first one that documents them in the end.

~ Sanjeev