---
aliases: ["On Consistency in Creative Work"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-writing]]", "[[topic-productivity-systems]]"]
Status: Published
---
# On Consistency in Creative Work
The most counterintuitive lesson from 5 years of publishing weekly: the newsletters I agonized over for days are not consistently better than the ones I wrote in 3 hours.

What does correlate with quality is freshness of thinking — whether I'm saying something I actually believe and find interesting, rather than something I think I should say.

Consistency forces this freshness. When you have to ship every week, you can't hide behind a blank page. You develop a practice of noticing: what actually caught my attention this week? What made me change my mind? That noticing becomes the raw material.

There is a mechanical explanation for why consistency works that has nothing to do with discipline or willpower. When you publish on a fixed schedule, you create a forcing function that makes you process your experiences into communicable ideas. Without the deadline, interesting observations accumulate in your head as vague impressions. With the deadline, those impressions become structured arguments, concrete examples, and clear recommendations. The newsletter does not just capture your thinking — it creates your thinking. I have lost count of the times I started writing a piece thinking I knew what I believed, only to discover halfway through that I actually believed something more nuanced or even contradictory.

This is why I push back when people say they are "not ready" to start a newsletter or blog. The readiness comes from the doing, not from some prerequisite period of quiet reflection. Every writer I admire has told me some version of the same story: they did not start writing because they had something to say. They discovered what they had to say because they started writing. The consistency created the content, not the other way around.

The risk of consistency is mechanical repetition — going through the motions of publishing without the genuine engagement that makes the work valuable. I have hit this several times with Refactoring, usually around the 6-8 month mark of a continuous streak. The antidote is not to break the streak but to change the input. Read something outside your domain. Have a conversation with someone who thinks differently. Travel. The consistency is the container; the input is the fuel. If the container is empty, the problem is not the container — it is that you have been consuming the same ideas for too long.

## Key insight
Consistency in creative work is not primarily about discipline — it is about creating the conditions for thinking to happen. A fixed publishing schedule transforms vague impressions into concrete ideas, forces engagement with new material, and builds a compounding body of work. The common fear that consistency leads to lower quality is almost always wrong. What leads to lower quality is inconsistency, because without regular practice, every piece feels like starting from scratch rather than building on a foundation.

## Related
- [[the-compound-effect-in-knowledge-work]] — Consistency is the mechanism through which knowledge work compounds
- [[writing-for-clarity-vs-writing-for-credit]] — Consistent writing practice develops the clarity muscle
- [[the-two-types-of-hard]] — Resistance to writing is usually the "hard of resistance," not skill gap
- [[ai-wont-replace-thinking]] — AI can accelerate consistent production but cannot replace the thinking that consistency forces
- [[procedure-weekly-newsletter]] — The practical procedure that maintains weekly consistency
