210: Break this Productivity Rule if You Have ADHD – Consistency is Key

Breaking the Rule: Why Chasing Consistency Just Stalled Me Out Completely

Every tenth episode of this podcast, I do a special “break the rule” series, taking some piece of conventional organizing, decluttering, or productivity advice and offering a twist better suited to ADHD brains. Today’s rule up for breaking: staying consistent is a game changer.

I agree consistency is genuinely useful, especially for monkey brains, and it can help fish brains too, until it turns into a stumbling block we build for ourselves. And I have a very fresh example, because I just lived it.

A month of silence, and why

I went nearly a month without releasing an episode, which is unusual for me since I typically manage weekly or every couple of weeks. Whenever there’s a gap like that, there’s always a reason, and it’s almost always me tripping over some rule I put in my own head.

I’m a spontaneous podcaster by nature. I don’t pre-plan topics on a calendar or bank episodes ahead of time the way podcasting experts recommend. An idea hits, I jot a few quick notes so I don’t lose my thread, and I hit record. That’s been the process for over 230 episodes. This time, though, episode 210 needed to be a “break the rule” episode, and I got stuck waiting for the right rule to break. Every other idea that popped into my head got waved off: no, that’s not a break-the-rule episode, I can’t record that one right now. I lost track of how many genuinely good episode ideas came and went during that month, simply because none of them fit the specific box I’d built for episode 210.

The real problem wasn’t consistency, it was perfectionism

Once I sat with it, I realized what actually stalled me wasn’t a lack of discipline, it was insisting that this particular milestone episode had to match its assigned theme perfectly. Because I couldn’t get it exactly right, I just stopped entirely, not just on that one episode, but on the podcast altogether.

Where else does this show up?

Look around your own house for the version of this. Maybe you won’t tackle the laundry room because you want every single item of clothing clean at once, but you can’t get there because there’s nowhere to put the clean clothes yet, and putting them somewhere temporary feels like doing the job twice, so you do it zero times instead, and the pile just sits there. Or maybe there’s a stack of items from a parent’s downsizing sitting on your dining table for weeks, driving you crazy every time you walk past it, because you’ve told yourself it all needs to be sorted and decided on in one single sitting.

Perfectionism really is the enemy of progress, and it’s the single most common thing I hear from people joining my podcast community when I ask about their biggest struggle: I don’t have a system, I can’t stick to a routine, I can’t stick to it. Often that “I can’t stick to it” story traces back to one missed day treated as proof of total failure. You meant to make the bed every morning, but one day your spouse slept in and you didn’t want to disturb him, so the bed didn’t get made, and suddenly the whole routine feels over. You meant to have a clean kitchen every night, but an emergency vet visit wiped you out, and now you’ve decided you’re just bad at this.

Picking back up isn’t starting over

Here’s the reframe: tomorrow is a new day, and picking back up where you left off isn’t the same as starting from zero. You know more now than you did the first time you attempted the routine. You’ve already proven you can do it for three days, or twelve, or a full month. That knowledge doesn’t disappear just because the streak broke. And sometimes a routine simply runs its course, your brain gets bored of it even if it was technically still working, and that’s not failure either. It just means it’s time for a fresh version, not a referendum on your discipline.

Sometimes the thing you’re “waiting for” turns out to be unnecessary

This applies to more than schedules. How often do we wait to start a project because we don’t have the “right” supplies yet, I can’t organize the drawer until I get drawer organizers, only to discover, once we actually start, that decluttering alone solved the problem and the organizer was never needed at all?

Your practical, actionable step

Look for one place you’ve completely stalled out because you’re waiting to do it perfectly or all at once. Ask yourself honestly what would happen if you just did a smaller, imperfect version of it right now, and let that be enough for today.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.