The right focus isn't quantity versus quality. Quality is assumed.
The right focus is on quantity versus consistency.
Churning out a dozen top-notch articles in one week won't do you much good if you vanish immediately thereafter and let your blog wither from neglect for the next six weeks. Your audience will be better served (and your growth goals will be better served) if you churn out two posts per week, consistently, instead.
You and your audience are better served when you show up on Twitter for five minutes, consistently, every single day, than when you show up for three hours once every couple of weeks.
You are better served by selecting one Most Valuable Task (and completing it) each day than to select a vision board-full of flashy goals that you actively pursue only every once in a while.
It's true that quantity and consistency are viable co-existers. One does not preclude the other. However, we tend to lose focus on consistency in favor of quantity, because somehow quantity always seems sexier. This results in setting audience expectations we can' t meet, trying to pursue more goals or projects than we have time and attention for, and ultimately, entrepreneurial burnout.
So if you're able to nurture both consistency and quantity, go forth and prosper wildly. But if it's a choice between pursuing consistency or quantity, choose consistency.
Consistently.
★ How do you stay on track with consistent action? What signs have you learned to spot that tell you you're focusing too heavily on quantity and are risking a burnout?
I’m a huge believer in consistency with just one caveat (that I’m still struggling to integrate myself, so let me know if you’ve got any insight):
Consistent quality is great so long as it doesn’t prevent sporadic brilliance. As much as we need good stuff we can bank on, we need brilliance more, in any dose we can get it.
You’re so right, Andy. Brilliance–or that creative jolt, the muse, the tingle of that really unique idea, however we want to view it–is vital and is arguably unplannable. You can’t decide, “Well, I’ll be brilliant three times a week, every week.” I think we all have peaks and valleys in our creative bursts, and when that switch is “on,” we’ve gotta go with it or risk losing it.
What I’d say on that is twofold: first, create and produce when the fire is lit, even if it’s in bursts, but pace the publishing or launching so that you publish those articles over a longer period of time but more consistently, rather than flooding your blog with them all at once and then having nothing in the pipeline.
Second, return to the consistency even when you’re not feeling the brilliance. While we can’t plan the brilliance, we can establish practices that make space for it, and consistently returning to our work and maintaining our focus even when we don’t feel like our creative muse is in full-on frolic mode is an important part of that.
So I guess my gut feeling is to still be consistent, but to be flexible enough to run with our muse and our brilliance when they show up. They key is then being strategic about how we use the products of those creative peaks to bridge the gaps between peaks so we don’t wind up showing up sporadically even if our creative peaks are sporadic.
But bottom line: Hell yes, we need brilliance. And consistency without any hint of creative flourish would get terribly boring really quickly!
…and we’ve got plenty of boring already.
Good points. Consistent and flexible can sometimes seem to sit at opposite ends of the work-style spectrum, but I like to think they can be friends.
I pretty much only blog when I feel I have something brilliant to say. This seems to work just fine for my audience which mostly comes from search engines anyhow, but I agree is unlikely to be a good blog strategy for a small business or service professional.
The small biz/service professional is definitely who I had in mind when I wrote this, but you bring up a good point, which is that “your mileage may vary” depending on what your goal is and what your audience’s expectations are.