When you don’t have to be consistent

The most important action you can take at the beginning of your UX journey is to strive for lots of output and being consistent. There are times when you can take a break, though.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

When I started writing here on Medium in February, I went into it heads on without too much self-judgement.

I usually don’t worry about publishing. It’s not really a big deal to write something and hit the publish button. It’s exciting, it’s extremely valuable and it teaches you a lot about the process.

Definitely something you should try if you’re thinking about it.

I published a story about my UX studies for a month almost every day

The stats looked promising and I was very happy to be able to share my thoughts with so many people.

Some of my stories caught attention of a quite large audience. Especially the ones about the crossroads of UX design and programming:

Should UX designers learn to code? An ex-developer’s perspective

Introduction to coding for UX and UI designers: data structures and objects

I went for consistency and increasing output as I think that’s the key value to go for at the beginning of every journey.

I pushed myself to first learn how exactly am I consistent and I applied what I’ve learned to my UX studies. I also wrote about my discoveries:

Benchmarking your UX workflow: using stats to measure your consistency

I wrote about the idea that being consistent over a period of time is much better than being perfect. It lets you actually ship instead of getting boggled in details.

Then came one day that changed a lot

My relationship with my long-term partner suddenly ended and I had to focus on other things. I didn’t like that suddenly I have no time to do my usual UX studies, to fire Adobe XD and make some projects as I did every day for a bit now.

And I stopped writing on Medium for almost a month.

I felt really unhappy that I’m taking a break from UX.

But this reminded me of an important lesson. You don’t have to be perfect. You are a human being and you need to prioritise things. And sometimes the priority is not where you would like it to be.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

When is consistency not required

So whenever you’re going through a rough patch in your life, be it

• a breakup,
• health problems or
• family problems

Just take a break, for your own sake. Take a week or a month off. Take care of yourself, be as happy as possible and come back to the task. Don’t be hard on yourself about it.

That’s what I did and it was gooooood. My energy came back and I can now continue pursuing my UX goals.

In all other circumstances, consistency is required.