Staying Consistent In A World Full of Distractions

Jake Boucher
3 min readOct 11, 2023

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Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

Staying consistent.

I struggle with this, and I’m sure you struggle with this or have struggled with it in the past.

It’s not easy to stay consistent.

I think it’s one of the more difficult things to do.

Doing what you need to do, day in and day out, with no let-up.

All it takes is one distraction, and you find yourself off the path you need to stay on.

Consistency of performance is essential. You don’t have to be exceptional every week but as a minimum, you need to be at a level that even on a bad day you get points on the board. — Sean Dyche

Staying on the path

This is the hardest part about consistency.

Not swaying and knocking yourself off the path.

I already mentioned the word distraction. It’s easy to distract yourself with something in today’s world (I’m guessing your phone is your number one distraction. I know mine is).

I’ve had countless moments where I’m working on something and taking a quick break to check social media, and the next thing you know, 20 minutes have passed.

After this occurs, getting myself back into work mode is nearly impossible for quite some time.

That’s when I find myself knocked off the path.

This tends to happen towards the end of my working day usually. Once I get knocked off the path, I’m not getting back on it. It doesn’t matter if I was in the middle of working on something. I’ve mentally clocked out after that.

When you look at people who are successful, you will find that they aren’t the people who are motivated, but have consistency in their motivation. — Arsene Wenger

Eliminate the cause of distraction

Eliminating the cause is easier said than done.

Eliminating my phone from my life is impossible. It’s the lifeblood of my real estate business.

What are some things I can do to improve the distractions caused by my phone?

  • Using the downtime feature on my phone so the apps that cause me the most problems are blacked out for a certain time period
  • Putting my phone in a different room
  • Using the Pomodoro method. Work for 25 minutes with no distractions, take a quick break, work 25 more minutes, and take a quick break. Do this until I’m done with whatever task it is

I’ve used all of these methods before, and they work too. The thing is, I don’t even use these methods every time I need to get work done. I need to get consistent at using these methods when needed.

It’s a never-ending cycle.

Being consistent means doing the things you need to do without fail.

If I did the above distraction eliminators each day, I would build consistency in using these methods. Which, in turn, would lead me to be more consistent in my work.

Is that really how simple it might actually be?

It could be. The question then becomes, can I do these things for 60 days straight, 90 days, 365 days?

If I can do something for 365 days straight, then I would be pretty damn consistent. And something I would be proud of too.

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