There’s a best practice that equates consistency with success. For some people—the Type A personalities—the problem with taking this advice is when you inevitably break a schedule—a day, or a week, or a month—then you feel guilty, disappointed, and maybe even like you shouldn’t even have started in the first place. It becomes more difficult to show up, which causes you to eventually disappear. 

Worse yet, even if you do keep showing up, the pressure of consistency may cause you to burn out over the long run—which also isn’t helpful.

The key is to channel consistency into a rule that liberates your work, not one that governs it. Here are some tactical ways to do that:

• Take intentional breaks: In an ideal world, you would forecast that you’re going on a break or hiatus. You can, however, also just stop. Prepare to do this early on, so that you can restore and recover your energy. People will understand. One of my favorite podcasts, Fun with Dumb, celebrates its 300th episode this Sunday—and there are some breaks spanning multiple months between some episodes. It doesn’t take away from the listening experience, and it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. 
• Prepare good filler content: Whether it’s a rerun, inviting guests, or publishing non-canonical content (like filler episodes, in anime), you can keep putting together material for people while you rest or incubate new ideas. For me, essentials week was one of those.
• Balance what you want to do with what you can do: I’ve recently been behind on this blog for several days at a time—for example, it’s August 10th, and I’m writing this post and backdating it to August 5th. It’s been like this for weeks, and it’s been really painful. There are a lot of reasons, but a big one is I realized I wanted to put more original thought into each of these posts—no more posts with just a book excerpt—but I also wanted to write material that I could repurpose into my next book. That criteria is probably a little too stringent for me, so I’m figuring it out.

If you’re going to aim for consistency, the practice needs to be something that feels fun and expansive. Whenever you feel guilty or behind, it’s probably time to take a break and re-evaluate what consistency means to you.