This week is incredibly special — it marks one year and exactly 52 weeks of zero missed issues for The Digital Update!

When I started this newsletter, I wanted to pull back the curtain on what building a service-based business actually looked like, use my business expertise to educate others, and share my experiences & takeaways along the way. Looking back at this year-long journey, one of the biggest lessons for me hasn't been about a trendy marketing hack, or a detailed analysis of AI or some other tech tool, it’s been about the power of consistency. We love to romanticize entrepreneurship, but building a business is hard work. Creating something on your own terms isn't about waiting for perfect inspiration to strike, it’s about showing up when you’d rather do something (or anything) else, embracing the truth that it is going to get messy, and at the end of the day, still simply just getting (the right) things done.

Here are some of my biggest takeaways from a year of unbroken, weekly, consistency: 

1. It’s going to get messy: In my head, I would be able to neatly show up every single week on the same day (even at the same time), using the same template, and write perfect newsletters every time for 52 weeks.🙂🫠 In reality, my template and newsletter format grew over time, and I ended up missing my scheduled writing period most of the time, which made me have to stay up late, or wake up early, or push something else to the side, just to get it done.

   
   

2. Just get it done: Perfectionism is the ultimate killer of progress. Action builds momentum, and thinking about action just creates anxiety. For some newsletters, they came easy, as I was inspired by the topic I had in mind. For others, I had no idea what would be helpful to write about that week, but I had to pick something and figure it out. It’s okay to sometimes lower your standards for the sake of just getting the job done. As long as you aren’t sacrificing core standards, just showing up and executing is often what matters most.

   
   

3. Use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage: Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” During the weeks where I didn’t know what to write, simply just sitting down and allowing myself the time to journey through the process helped me at least write something. Sometimes, the journey was rewarding and I actually ended up writing some newsletters that I really felt good about by the end. Other times, even though my newsletter wasn’t “perfect,” creating this space to sit down and write allowed me to commit to what I said I would do.

   
   

4. Adapt, but still commit: It’s great to start with the perfect plan in mind, but life, circumstances, and simply our imperfect human nature & “feelings” will inevitably throw us off course. Unfortunately, that’s just the way things are, so don’t fight it! Just be flexible. Sometimes, I would write longer, detailed, newsletters. Other times, I just wrote something short and quick to get it done and move on to the next week. Plus, giving myself a week in between newsletters allowed me opportunities to reschedule my writing time if I missed my planned day or time that week. By the end of each week though, I still committed to coming away with a finished newsletter, however things ultimately ended up coming together.