I wrote about consistency in March. Then I disappeared for 81 days.
In March, I published a post called Why Consistency Always Wins Over Intensity.
Four days later, I published one more.
And then I disappeared for 81 days.
No post. No “taking a short break” note. Just silence, from someone whose About page promises you one new idea every single week. Up until January, I had not missed a single upload for 31 straight weeks. This time, however, was different.
When I finally came back, it didn’t last long. I disappeared again. Fifty days. Then one post about roller coasters. Then another 83 days.
If you had described this pattern to me, I would have used it in one of my own posts as the perfect example of what not to do.
So this post is two things.
It’s an honest explanation of where I went.
And it’s the most useful lesson about consistency I’ve learned since starting this newsletter, because I had to learn it by breaking my own rule.
Where I Went
The short version: life got very full, and the newsletter was the first thing to go.
The longer version:
I moved to Helsinki for half a year. I wrote about the decision in The Quiet Power of Changing Your Environment. New city, new university semester, new language (Finnish is… something), and a lot of very dark afternoons. It’s also where I started building deep relationships with people I now really care about, and I invested a lot of time into them.
I kept my full-time job. Work in banking tech got more interesting, not less. I was made one of the main people responsible for building a new credit lending platform. On top of that, I got to explore how AI can be used responsibly in a heavily regulated environment.
I traveled. A lot. Finland, Norway, Sweden, Lapland, Estonia, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Japan…
I kept staying active. My training routine stayed in place through all of it.
I kept doing my Japanese. Every. Single. Day.
None of these are excuses. I don’t regret any of them, least of all the time I put into the experiences in Helsinki. I would make every one of those decisions again.
But look at that last bullet again. Because that’s where this gets interesting.
The Habit That Didn’t Break
During the exact same months the newsletter went quiet, I barely missed a single day of my Japanese vocabulary reviews.
Not in Helsinki. Not on travel days. Not during exam weeks. Not on the day I spent riding roller coasters in Poland.
Around 350 word reviews a day, often well over an hour, for a year and a half straight. That’s how I got to 10,000 Japanese words.
Same person. Same willpower. Same calendar.
One habit survived more than 500 days without a break. The other one broke for almost three months. Twice.
So the problem clearly wasn’t discipline. If it were, both habits would have died.
When I looked at why one survived and the other didn’t, I found three differences. And every single one of them is something I had already written about. I just hadn’t applied it to the thing I was writing.
1. Skipping vocabulary review is expensive. Skipping a post felt free.
I learn vocabulary with spaced repetition: a flashcard app shows me each word again right before I’m likely to forget it, so every day comes with its own batch of reviews that are due. Skip a day and those reviews don’t go away. They pile up: miss one day and tomorrow is twice as heavy, miss a week and you’re staring at a mountain.
The cost of skipping is immediate and visible.
Skipping a week of writing costs… nothing. At least nothing you can see. Nobody sends you an angry email. The world keeps spinning.
But the cost is there. It’s just delayed and invisible. Every week you don’t write, the habit gets a little weaker, the restart gets a little scarier, and readers slowly get out of the habit of opening your emails.
I recently went through my own numbers, and it’s right there. When I was posting every week, a post got almost 40 likes on average. Since my posting turned irregular this year, that’s down to under 25. And every post after a long break did worse than the posts before it.
Habits with invisible costs are the first to die when life gets busy.
If a habit matters to you, find a way to make skipping it visible.
2. My Japanese had a minimum. Writing didn’t.
In the consistency post, I wrote about the minimum viable dose: 10 push-ups, one page, one paragraph. I called all-or-nothing thinking the biggest threat to consistency.
For my Japanese, I had a minimum: even on the worst day, I do my reviews. New words can wait.
For the newsletter, I had exactly one standard: a full, researched, illustrated post. Every week.
On a normal week, that’s fine. On a week where you’re moving to another country, preparing for an exam and working on a big project at your job, it’s way harder
And when the only acceptable option is impossible, the option you actually end up choosing is nothing.
I was the exact person from my own post. All in, then gone.
3. The bar kept rising.
This one is sneaky.
When I started, nobody was reading. Publishing was easy, because nothing was at stake.
At 1,000 subscribers, a post felt a bit more important. At 5,000, more so. At 10,000, every post started to feel like it had to be my best one yet. Longer. More research. Better visuals.
Higher standards sound like a good thing. But a higher bar also means higher activation energy. Every draft got measured against an imaginary “worthy of 10,000 people” standard, and most of them never made it out of my notes app.
Meanwhile, look at what actually resonated with you over the past year.
Not the most polished posts. The most personal ones. The solo travel post. The one about moving to Helsinki. Those weren’t the most researched. They were the most honest.
I was raising the bar on the wrong dimension.
What I Got Wrong About Consistency
I used to think consistency meant never stopping.
Now I think it means something slightly different: never stopping without a plan.
Life has seasons. A semester abroad is a season. Launching something new is a season. Some seasons genuinely have room for less, and that’s fine.
Slowing down isn’t the failure. Going silent is.
Here’s what I would tell my March self:
Lower the floor, don’t remove it. In a busy season, a shorter post is still a post.
Announce the season. “Heavy month, posts will be shorter” costs one sentence and keeps the trust.
Never miss twice. This rule is literally in my own Time Optimization Playbook. I missed considerably more than twice.
Restart small. The first post back should be the easiest one to write, not the most impressive one.
You’re reading me apply that last one right now.
What Changes Now
Here’s the new system for Output Theory, starting today.
1. Every Saturday. For real this time. Output Theory comes out every Saturday again. That’s what the About page has always promised. The difference is that this time there’s a system behind the promise, not just good intentions.
2. A minimum version. If a full post isn’t realistic, you’ll get a short field note instead: one idea, one experience, a few hundred words. Smaller, but still every Saturday.
3. A buffer. I’m keeping two finished drafts in reserve at all times, so a busy week doesn’t automatically mean an empty inbox.
4. Less polish, more honesty. Fewer ultimate guides. More of what I’m actually doing, testing and getting wrong. That’s what you’ve responded to most anyway.
5. The follow-ups I owe you. A few of you asked how the Helsinki chapter turned out. I also promised you more on Naval and on my study system. Those are coming, and Helsinki is next.
Final Thoughts
The funny thing is that these months taught me more about consistency than the post I wrote about it.
Writing about a principle is easy. Noticing where you’re quietly breaking it is the hard part.
If there’s one thing I’d want you to take from this: when a habit breaks, don’t ask “Why am I so undisciplined?”
Ask: “What does the habit that didn’t break have that this one doesn’t?”
The answer is usually not willpower. It’s design.
And thank you for still being here. Genuinely. Over 10,000 of you stuck around through months of silence, and I don’t take that for granted.
See you next Saturday.
— Tobi
If this resonated with you, forward it to a friend who has been meaning to restart something.
💡 Question: What’s a habit you dropped this year, and what would make it easier to restart?
Tobias, it is all about balance and what works for you at the time. Glad you took the time to do the reflection. Glad too to have you back, in whatever capacity works for you.
'Lower the floor, don't remove it' is a practical rule, Tobi. When the only acceptable option is the full, polished version, it's easy to end up choosing nothing. I also appreciate the honest look at your own numbers. Asking what the habit that survived has that the other one doesn't is a much better question than asking why we're so undisciplined.