So the question we have got is how to be consistent with work? This is a question that everybody and people around them ask multiple times in their career! Most of them are usually able to find the answer to the same thing after a lot of experience! So, if you want to be consistent with the work below, there are three important things that you need to take care of:
Set Your Expectations Straight
1. The first and the most important thing is, you need to set your expectations straight. And here’s where many people mess up, because they often set goals, achieving them which are not in their hands, those yardsticks that set out a lot of anxiety into the very process of the work itself, leading them to eventually get rid of the work itself. A simple example of the same is if I am a content creator and I set my expectation to reach 1 million followers on YouTube by 2022 or 2023, then I will make content solely to increase my followers. And if you see, the number of followers I have is nowhere in my control. But if I focus on the process and set my expectations, I will upload two high-quality videos a week, which might result in one million followers. That’s where I have two videos a week as work that is completely in my control. These are expectations that I can actually fulfill.
So, while most people focus on the result of it, the important thing is to focus on the process, and immediately you will understand that the result is merely a by-product of you putting your heart and soul into your process. Therefore, always set goals in such a way that you are in complete control of the process itself and, if that is done, you will be able to fall in love with the process and eventually do some quality work and the result will just come by itself.
Establish Check-Points
2. Let’s move on to the second step and that is about establishing checkpoints wherein you set a goal, and then you break down the rest of the schedule in such a way that you have many checkpoints to give you an understanding of whether you are ahead of the schedule or behind the schedule. Now let’s try to relate it with an experience: if you have noticed this every time you prepare for your exams, try to complete a college project or try to manage an event, you would have realized that regardless of how big or small the syllabus is, how complicated or simple the project is or how grand or small the event is, the last days are always full of chaos and hassle.
Now the question is, if you had 3 months to prepare for the exam, if you know what project is to be made and how, or have a big team ready for the event, then why do we tend to get late every single time! And if you had looked at the root cause of the problem, you would have understood that you didn’t have any idea about whether you were ahead of the schedule or behind the schedule all throughout those six months. And when the last moment comes, then comes the realization that you are way behind the schedule and have to work very hard.
So what we could have decided to do was we could have made something called the face plan, wherein we could have set mini-checkpoints in such a way that at the end of every month we would have set a particular target, for example, if we had three months to prepare for the exams, we could have set the target to complete one-third of the syllabus in the first months, one fourth in the second month and in the last month we would have completed the rest of the syllabus along with the revision. This plan would have worked well.
But what we usually do we think is there are still three months left, I will start preparations from next month, then in the next month, we say aah too tired now, will start from the next week, then the same thing continues, and we end up procrastinating so much that most of the preparation get left for the last few days. Now in case of the content creation thing, if I know that I have to put in two videos a week, I will not sit down to make the video at the last minute. What I will do is I will constantly keep an agenda that today I have to finish my writing, tomorrow I have to shoot the video. The day after tomorrow I will edit the video. So if I know that writing needs to be done on day one by the end of that day if I’m not done with writing, I will push myself ahead and complete my writing. But if I do not set this checkpoint, I will say let’s do it tomorrow and the next day I will have to do writing and shooting both and then procrastination might kick in over there also eventually I will fall behind schedule.
So because of this idea of the face plan that is breaking down the end goal into smaller checkpoints, we can have a very clear idea about when we can procrastinate and when we can not because, to be honest, most of us procrastinate by default.
Take A chill-Pill
3. Let’s move on to the next step and this is about taking a chill pill. Now what exactly it means.
We often have this tendency to treat ourselves like a machine. A very simple example of the same is what we can witness during college time. While we’re studying for our exams, we often say that we will do one chapter in an hour and by the end of ten hours the syllabus will be finished, which never works out! And because we think of ourselves as a machine, but in reality, we are a human who needs breaks. This is something that we often hear people saying that they will run for five kilometres a day and by the end of this month they will lose the expected amount of weight. Because hardly anyone achieves this goal that they have set, they get heartbroken and slog throughout the rest of the time, which ultimately leads to a lot of mental pressure & burnout.
This burning out is something that we’re supposed to avoid and here’s where our self-awareness comes into play, we need to find out one or two activities that we can do which we feel very fresh. It could be anything like reading books, watching Netflix or playing cricket! Incorporating these rejuvenating activities into our day-to-day life will make sure that we don’t get burned out by the process of work. Because if work is degrading the quality of our lives, then the very purpose of work itself is defeated, which is to make our lives better.
So always make sure that you have gaps in between such that you can rejuvenate yourself and then decide to what extent you are going to push yourself and beyond which you need to take a break.
And one bonus tip would be to keep off the distractions such as mobile notifications, annoying colleagues, etc. Because distractions are like parasites, if you don’t kill them they will kill your dreams! So make your action plan now and start working!
