Consistency Is Hard—Here’s How to Make Progress Without It

If you’ve struggled to stick with routines, it’s not a moral failing, it’s likely a mismatch between what you’ve been told “should” work and what actually fits how your brain works.

Here are a few reasons why follow-through can feel so hard:

• Executive dysfunction: Initiating tasks, sustaining focus, and managing time can all be harder when your executive functioning is taxed.
• All-or-nothing thinking: If you miss one day, your brain might tell you it’s not worth continuing, so you stop entirely.
• Unrealistic expectations: Trying to go from 0 to 100 overnight often leads to burnout or overwhelm.
• Shame spirals: When you fall behind, it’s easy to beat yourself up instead of re-engaging.

But there’s another way.

Messy consistency is about returning to the thing over and over again, even if imperfectly.

You don’t have to do something every single day to make it part of your life. The key is returning, not punishing yourself when things drop off, but gently re-engaging when you’re able.

In this model, skipping isn’t failure—it’s normal. What matters is coming back.

Our brains, and our lives, are cyclical, not linear. We move through seasons of energy, focus, and motivation. Some weeks we’re fired up and productive. Other weeks, not so much.

Cyclical progress means honoring these ups and downs. It means trusting that slow seasons don’t erase your progress. You don’t have to start from scratch each time; your past efforts still count. You’re learning, adapting, and layering new patterns over time.

Try thinking in terms of:

• Seasons, not streaks
• Patterns, not perfection
• Return, not restart
  

This mindset shift alone can help break the shame cycle that often comes with “falling off track.”

For many people with executive functioning challenges, success is often defined too narrowly. If you don’t complete the full routine, hit the big goal, or follow through exactly as planned, it doesn’t “count.”

Let’s change that.

Success can mean:

• Starting, even if you don’t finish.
• Doing some of the task.
• Coming back after a break.
• Trying again after a “fail.”
• Taking care of yourself in the process.
  

If you’re showing up in any way, you’re building something. Progress is often invisible at first, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Another way to think about progress is to focus less on how often you do something and more on how much it adds up over time. This is the idea of accumulation, where small, scattered efforts eventually build into something meaningful, even if they don’t follow a set schedule.

Let’s say you’re trying to read more. You might not read every day, but if you read five pages here, ten pages there, and a full chapter on a weekend, by the end of the month, you’ve read a whole book. That’s accumulation. That’s progress.

This approach is especially helpful when your energy and focus come in waves. Rather than forcing consistency you can’t maintain, you can take advantage of the moments when motivation strikes, whether it’s at 9 am on a Tuesday or 10 pm on a Sunday night.

When you take action whenever you feel like it, without guilt for the times you don’t, you let your efforts compound in a way that still honors your rhythm. This style of progress is often more sustainable because it works with your brain, not against it.

So next time your inner critic tells you, “You’re not doing this consistently enough to make it count,” try countering with: “It’s adding up, and that counts more than a perfect routine.”

Here are a few reflection prompts to get you started:

• What’s a goal I’ve been trying to be “perfectly consistent” with?
• What would it look like to make messy progress on this instead?
• What’s one micro-step I can try today?
• How can I reframe “falling off” as part of the process, not a failure?

You don’t have to follow through perfectly to follow through meaningfully.