One way to stay consistent is to keep track of what you’re doing. By keeping track you can actually see — over the course of many months and years — how consistent you’ve actually been. Did you take a break during the holidays? Did you make big progress during the summer? These are things you can see when you start tracking your writing and other creative projects. 

A tracker can be anything you want, it can be a notebook, it could be a spreadsheet, but I like a simple calendar. Preferably Google Calendar. 

When you start tracking your work, whether you’re writing a novel, building a YouTube channel, or growing a business, you’ll begin to see ups and downs. Sometimes you’re doing great: you increase your word count or you hit a record high days in a row of working on a project. Other times you see lows: days where you didn’t even open your notebook or edit a video. It’s that week that you got sick and you didn’t publish or that month when you were on vacation. 

It is in these lows — or as I like to call them, valleys — that you lose your momentum. These valleys can expand into canyons if you don’t handle them properly. These valleys can be so demoralizing, especially when you are looking up and seeing how high your peaks were and you question whether you can ever get back to that level. 

Tracking your work keeps you honest and it can be a compassionate motivator if you know how to use it. The secret is in how we define “progress”. 

Sure there will be days where you don’t make a lot of progress in your writing, but you took some photographs that help to inspire your next chapter. It’s easy to dismiss that activity and call it something else besides work and, therefore, you don’t track it. But maybe you can track it. Mark it down as “Doing research for the novel”, categorize it differently from “word counts” or “publishing”, give it a different color in the tracker if you must, but track it.

You get to decide what you want to track as creative work. It could be reading, watching a movie, or listening to a new album to get inspiration. All this could be considered research. All this could be a way to refresh your creativity because creativity can come in those moments where you aren’t at the computer writing or editing. 

As you begin to include these other activities in your tracker, you’ll see that your valleys aren’t a dramatic drop-off. Your valleys aren’t pits and they contain moments where you were making progress, albeit you weren’t increasing your word count, polishing your piece, or hitting publish. 

Focusing on raising your valleys to me has been super effective in staying consistent. And it works for all things. No project or business can maintain a straight hockey stick growth forever. Eventually, you’ll have to battle with peaks and valleys. Peaks are great! Everything is wonderful when you are at the peak. 

In fact, it feels so good, we end up putting too much attention on it. Our highest records, our biggest profit, or recorded breaking post. The peak is great, but it doesn’t need your immediate attention. Focus on the valleys. It is the valleys that will make all the difference in terms of your longevity and growth. Focus on increasing your valleys by tracking what you did during those days that impacted your project indirectly. The higher your valleys become, the higher your baseline will be over time. 

Rather than trying to reach a higher peak by putting in all-nighters for a week and then burning out. Focus on doing a little bit every day, adding more as you go, and pulling back if you need rest. Maintaining your valley will keep you consistent. The beautiful thing about all of this is that you get to decide how to track your growth. Not all tasks are equal, but all tasks can be tracked. When they are, you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time. You’ll see progress, even if it is a long slog through the valley. 

This is a mindset that has worked for me, I hope it works for you. Let me know if you have another method of staying consistent in the comments below. 

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