Why consistency is so critical to meeting your goals

As you establish your career, you want to find a way to be seen as reliable. That means developing habits that enable you to be a consistent performer so that you are recognized as someone who will complete what you are asked to do, on time and with high quality.

I used the word “habits” here on purpose. Being consistent is not something that is easy to do if you have to think about what to do in every situation. Instead, you need to have behaviors that you engage automatically each day that enable you to perform day in and day out.

Here are a few ways to develop the critical habits that support your consistency:

Have a solid routine

One of the most significant factors that can hold you back from being consistent is the way you live your life overall. Being consistent at work means showing up on time and being able to concentrate effectively throughout the day. If you are consistently running late on the way to work, you will feel like you’re playing catch-up all day. If your energy levels get low at key parts of the day, you are not going to be as productive.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do to develop more consistency is to get regular sleep. There are individual differences in how much sleep people need, but most people need about eight hours of good sleep a night. As boring as it may seem, getting to bed at a consistent time each night is important. Avoid substances like caffeine or alcohol that can disrupt your sleep patterns.

Regular exercise helps as well. The state of your body also influences the state of your mind. When your body is functioning well, your concentration is also improved.

Good sleep has lots of benefits. It helps to create more even energy levels throughout the day. Sleep also helps to remove toxins from the brain that promotes long-term health. In addition, sleep allows you to maintain your emotional resilience. Sleep lessens the persistent impact of events that lead to negative emotions.

A regular routine also helps you to arrive at work on time. When you wake up at the same time each day, you can plan to be ready to work on time. This is particularly important if you have to commute to an office.

Slow and steady wins the race

Consistency is about ensuring that you get high-quality work done every day. Bringing your best self to work requires you to understand your own work style. Everyone has an optimal amount of effort they can put in daily and still be ready to come back to work the next day. When you put in a lot more effort than that on a given day, you are likely to come back the following day with a decreased ability to concentrate, which can lead to a lot of wasted time.

Structure your workday to find that optimal “marathon” pace that will allow you to be ready to work effectively each day. Avoid prolonged sprints. Work with your supervisor to prioritize tasks so that you are not putting in long hours that make you less effective as time goes on. Start working on long-term projects in advance so that you are not pressed against deadlines in ways that lead you to late nights.

Pay attention to negative feedback

Often, when something at work goes badly, you want to avoid thinking about it. After all, rehashing a mistake or failure is painful to do. It brings back feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy that are physically uncomfortable to experience.

Yet, there is a lot of important information in the errors and failures you experience at work. You may not be able to delve into those details on the day you experience a failure, but after a few days (and nights of sleep), you will be better able to think about those bad outcomes. Use those experiences to identify places where things went wrong. If you have a hard time figuring that out for yourself, talk to your supervisor or a trusted mentor to get feedback.

Consistency requires learning from mistakes—you don’t want to be consistent in the errors you make. The more that you practice doing your own postmortem analyses of errors, the easier it becomes to do them in the future. When you recognize the benefits of changing your behavior as a result of mistakes, you will start to see the opportunities in errors rather than just the consequences of tasks that went wrong. That can lessen the impact of negative feelings that come along with failures.