086: The real reason sticking to a consistent schedule is hard

Jan 22

During the past 3 years, I’ve had a harder time sticking to a regular schedule consistently. And I know I’m not alone – I’ve had clients and business owner friends who have said the same thing.

Often when we struggle with sticking to a schedule, it's common to think

a) "I just haven't found the right schedule" (planner, system, task app, time management tool etc), or

b) "Something's wrong with me"

The latter is especially prevalent for high achievers who used to stick to a consistent schedule, or were consistent with getting things done, but who for some reason now struggle.

In the episode, I'll share

why the problem is *not* you
while finding a schedule that fits you helps, it’s hard to stick to it if you don’t have the capacity
where in your productivity ecosystem you can pinpoint the actual problem
what my schedule follow-through has looked like in the past few years
what I'm experimenting with schedule-wise in 2023

Productivity Ecosystem summary

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Show notes

I want to assure you that nothing’s wrong with you, you are not the problem when it’s hard to keep doing things in a way that used to work for you. The problem most likely lies in your productivity ecosystem.

If you’re new here and don’t know what I’m talking about, the productivity ecosystem is the framework that I lean on to help clients be productive in a sustainable, human-friendly way. The ecosystem consists of wholeness, design, and sisu. Wholeness is all about our wellbeing, design is about the systems and practices that support us, and sisu is in a nutshell our motivation, determination, grit and resilience.

Now – your schedule or how you plan your tasks is one piece of design. It might feel obvious that if you just find the “right” way to plan or figure out the “right” schedule, the issue should be solved.

My 2020-2022

Before I jump into explaining what else might be going on, I’ll give you a bit of a peek at what it’s looked like for me the past few years – because I think what happened illustrates this so well.

So, before March of 2020, I had a pretty steady schedule.

I had themes for each day of the week
I’d add tasks to my weekly planning sheet according to the themed days when possible
For the most part, I did what I had planned for the day

In these past 3 years, it’s been a bit extra challenging to stick to my schedule and plans.

I couldn’t do family photo sessions for about 1.5 years. During that time I jumped into the coaching business with both feet. My workload or my tasks changed, and my old schedule just didn’t work anymore.
I also adjusted the tasks I worked on to my energy levels more often.
I’d still get the things done that I had planned – but I wasn’t too strict about doing the tasks on the day or week that I originally planned them for.
While my work schedule wasn’t always consistent, I did stick to pretty regular daily routines, which was very important for my well-being.

2022 felt a little more energetically stable, and in 2022 I also had a more consistent flow of photography sessions again. So I actually did have months that felt kinda like the “good old days” of 2019, where my workload was more predictable.

What most time management and productivity experts don’t talk about when it comes to consistency

In general, humans do well when there’s a sense of predictability. (That’s why planning and schedules and routines are key ingredients in your design.)

But for some reason, there were times during these past few years when sticking to something regular felt more like a burden than something that would be helpful.

Design, and in this case a regular schedule, is important for consistency – because knowing what to do and when helps free up your brain for the actual work you need to do. But design alone isn’t enough.

To be consistent, we also need wholeness and sisu – because together they strengthen our capacity to keep showing up, to be consistent, and to follow through with our design.

We need all three parts of the ecosystem working together.

→ When you’re feeling drained, sad, exhausted – aka when you don’t feel well – the brain wants to protect you from adding on further stress.

→ It’s also harder to stick to a plan, if your sisu, so your motivation and determination, starts to falter. Oour sisu is impacted by what happens in the world too.

So in short, good design supports us – but some parts of our design are hard to uphold, if we don’t feel well *and* we feel a bit purposeless or unmotivated. We need capacity for follow-through.

What I’ll experiment with for 2023

In hindsight, I could’ve done more for my wholeness and my sisu in the past few years. Because while I was getting things done that I wanted to and I cared about, I didn’t feel quite like myself taking it all so day-by-day. Because when I do follow a more structured schedule, it helps me then be more spontaneous and creative outside of work.

But I also acknowledge that Hey,

I’m just human
I did more to take care of myself in the past 3 years than I did probably in the 5 years prior
I was still getting things done in the past few years, I just needed that flexibility in my design to make space for being human
I’m still learning

So here we are now, it’s 2023. Even though keeping things quite flexible in the past few years has served me ok, now I feel like I’m ready again for something more consistent schedule-wise. I can feel that there’s a kind of heaviness that has lifted a little bit.

So I’m going to refresh my schedule, see what kinds of themed days would make the most sense in this current season. And try to be more diligent about sticking to my themed days regularly.

We’ll see how this goes! I still want to allow how I actually execute my plans to be flexible enough to be sustainable. Because when we aren’t flexible about how we execute things, we’re more likely to give up when we don’t do them perfectly.

Final words for you

If you’ve been feeling bad about not being able to stick to your plans or to be consistent, I hope that this episode brought you relief. Inconsistency is a sign that there’s something going on with your productivity ecosystem – it’s not a sign that something’s wrong with *you* as a person.

Usually when I share this with my clients, they feel so much better and have more understanding toward themselves. And then they’re in a better place to make changes that improve the situation.

If you’d like to be more consistent, maybe with your schedule or certain business activities, I’d be happy to team up and dig into your ecosystem to find solutions that support you.

Jenna Hellberg