I don't want to be impressive, I want to be consistent

I graduated two weeks ago. I started my full time marketing position at Omni this week. Like a lot of people, I spent the first few days thinking:

Cool, let’s go. I’ve been working part time here for 3 years. I know the team, the rhythm, the work. But here’s what no one tells you: when you go full time, the weight of your time changes. Suddenly, every hour has consequence. You wake up and realize: your day is entirely yours to waste or use well. And I think that realization either spins you out, or sharpens you. So I chose to get sharper.

Here is what I have learned over the last 3 weeks. Productivity, clarity, and long term trust, without falling into the performative post grad trap.

Table of Contents

1. The hard truth: your inputs matter more than your ideas
2. I don’t want to be impressive, I want to be consistent
3. I studied habit formation before day one, here’s what stuck
4. How I present information: short, sharp, scoped
5. Managing expectations (and being taken seriously early)
6. I don’t schedule time. I schedule attention
7. How I’m measuring success in month one
8. The system I’m using to not drift
9. Questions I’m holding, not rushing to answer

1. The Hard Truth: Your Inputs Matter More Than Your Ideas

Early on, people reward sharp ideas. Good instincts. Quick takes. The clever observation at just the right time. But that credit runs out fast. You get one round of credit for being smart. After that, what matters is what you finish. Not once, but repeatedly. Trust isn’t built by brilliance, it’s built by consistency.

So I built a rhythm to ground myself:

Morning (before anything else): What’s the single most valuable thing I could move today? Not five things. One!!

Evening (no matter what got done): What did I actually move? What felt hard or messy? Did anything feel frictionless?

End of week (ruthlessly honest): Where did I lose clarity? Where did I default into motion instead of direction?

This is the difference between “doing things” and actually making progress. My biggest risk this year isn’t failure, it’s drift. So I’m trying my best to start building around that, without burnout.

2. I Don’t Want to Be Impressive. I Want to Be Consistent

The pressure to impress is everywhere after graduation. You feel it in how people talk about their roles. You feel it on Slack, on LinkedIn, in the need to always seem “on.” It’s subtle, but it’s most likely there: this unspoken expectation to be a standout, fast. I’ve felt that pressure too. But I’m deliberately choosing a different posture. I’m not optimizing standout, every day all the time. This is a recipe for burnout. I’m optimizing for follow through. I want to be someone who people trust to deliver, even when no one’s watching.

So I have started to ask myself these questions:

• Did I do exactly what I said I’d do, without needing to be reminded?
• Did I surface issues early enough that they never became problems?
• Did I simplify something for someone else today?

What I have noticed the past few years that is becoming more apparent now is that it’s rarely the highest output person who holds the room, it’s the one others know they can rely on without follow up. To sum that up very simply: trust, not intensity. And that’s the kind of credibility I care about earning right now. It’s the kind of person I want to work on being in my professional life, especially while my habits regime is still impressionable.

3. I Studied Habit Formation Before Day One, Because I Didn’t Want to Start by Reacting

I’ve tried to build good habits before. Most of us have. Wake up earlier, stay off my phone, drink water, read more. Some of it sticks for a week. Most of it breaks the minute things get chaotic.

Six months ago, I actually asked my company’s CEO what habits he relies on. I was spiraling a little, trying to figure out how to create more structure in my life, and figured he’d have some hyper optimized system. But his answer surprised me. He told me that he under no circumstance uses electronics right before bed. He also sets time to read each night. At the time, it felt very… finance bro. (Sorry Austin) But now that I’m building habits to last and understand that something as simple as that can be huge, I actually find myself thinking about that answer a lot. Because as cliché as it sounds, choosing to do one small thing every day, does something to your character. Discipline is built through friction. And sometimes that friction shows up at 11:45pm when your brain wants TikTok but your future self needs sleep.

A few weeks before starting full time, I gave myself a reset.

Here’s what I took with me:

• Friction, not motivation, is what breaks most habits: Motivation is a mood. Friction is structural. If your habit depends on you wanting to do it, it’s already fragile. Make the action obvious, easy, default.
• Burnout isn’t just from overwork, it’s from vagueness: I used to think I got overwhelmed from doing too much. But most of the time, I was just doing too much without knowing why. I wasn’t overworked, I was under aligned. I did not have a plan. I actually want to touch on this note a bit more, because a lot of you reading this are likely in the same boat as me: startup world. You probably know exactly what this feels like. You make a mini plan for the week. You set your priorities. You even carve out time to focus. And then, suddenly, it’s Friday, and you realize you’ve completed 15% of your original plan and 85% of things that were thrown at you mid week. A new request comes in, and you want to be helpful. So you drop what you were doing and knock it out. It feels good. Responsive. Useful. But here’s what I’ve realized: every time you do that without recalibrating your system, you create a lump in your productivity. A pile up of context switching and half finished work, or worse, a piece of work that’s half REALLY well done, and the other half rushed. And even if you crushed the new task, the week ends with a quiet sense of failure, not because you weren’t productive, but because you weren’t anchored. Clarity is what prevents that. It’s about returning to the question: what actually matters right now? And what am I willing to let go of to protect that?
• Identity shapes behavior, not the other way around: If you want something to stick, it can’t just be a goal. It has to be a signal to yourself about who you are. Not “I want to be productive,” but “I’m the kind of person who follows through.”

So I started building from that place:

• Mornings: Name one thing that matters today.
• Evenings: Log what dragged, what flowed, what I want to do differently.
• Weekly: Review, not what I finished, but where I lost clarity. Can I identify something I can do better next week? Is there something I did this week that would be nice to continue doing next week?

Protecting the parts of the day that matter most, and proving to yourself, in small, boring ways, that you can be someone who keeps promises to yourself. You can, in fact, learn to be the best version of yourself.

4. How I Present Information: Short, Sharp, Scoped

People don’t want a paragraph. They want a decision. This changed everything for me: presenting a good idea is only half the job. Packaging it well is the rest.

So I write like this:

• 1 line of context
• 2 options with tradeoffs
• 1 clear recommendation
• A specific ask

That’s it. No “thoughts?” No over explaining. Enough structure to make whoever needs to respond.

5. Managing Expectations (and Being Taken Seriously Early)

I used to think managing expectations meant being overly communicative. Sending updates all the time. Looping everyone in. While this is mostly true, I have found that there is actually a way to communicate but in a very proactive way.

I’m still learning this, but here’s what’s helping:

• I confirm what success looks like, even if it feels obvious. Not only between myself and others, but between myself and my mind.
• I check alignment before going heads down. “Is this still the highest priority based on where we’re at now?”
• When something slips, I try my best to flag it early
• And when it comes to proposing ideas or flagging new work, I’m trying to use language that shows I understand how priorities are set, not just that I have a good instinct.
• Instead of saying: “This feels important. I think we should look into it” I’d like to reframe and say: “I’m flagging this as a potential P1. It unblocks [x], ties directly to [y], and we’re aiming to ship [z] soon.”

Language like that gets taken seriously. This one is quite the adjustment for me, and I am still trying to implement it. Communicating effectively after being around college students for the last 4 years is a task for sure, but it’s worth working on.

6. I Don’t Schedule Time. I Schedule Attention

Most of us have enough hours. What we don’t have is the ability to protect our best ones. I was actually going to share my pattern so far, but in all honesty it’s still pretty awry. In true post grad fashion, I am still figuring this out. All I can say is that my deep work time will not be before 9 AM, lol.

My goal here is to block off my best hours. I try to use the foggier ones for tasks that don’t need my brain at full power. I’m designing around the natural rhythm that’s already there. This system is not perfect. But it’s honest. And it’s better than pretending every hour of the day is equally valuable.

7. How I’m Measuring Success in Month One

It’s tempting to measure success early on by how much you ship or how fast you respond. Especially during your first few check ins as a new hire. So, I’ve been asking myself a different question:

Am I working in a way that reflects clarity, consistency, and care?

Here’s what “good” looks like for me right now:

I know what matters most each day, and I do it I communicate cleanly, without chaos I follow through I create calm for the people around me, not more confusion I finish work before someone follows up

If those are true, I am a valuable addition to my team.

8. The System I’m Using to Not Drift

One of the hardest shifts after school is realizing no one is managing your time for you anymore. A bad grade was often a wakeup call to do better. Now, I need to save myself before I get to the point of a “bad grade”.

I’m using a low friction weekly system:

• Monday mornings I write down at least 5 nonnegotiable priorities, the things that will get done no matter what. Then, I list all the optional-but-important tasks on my radar. These matter too, but they don’t come at the expense of the core 5. This split forces me to choose what’s actually essential, and protects my priorities.
• Daily I log what came up that I didn’t expect. What pulled my attention? What felt urgent but wasn’t planned? I note anything I had to drop and flag it for later or next week. This keeps me from losing track of work that matters just because it didn’t fit neatly into the calendar.
• Friday review: What moved? What got stuck? What did I avoid? Why?

This all helps me notice what’s working and where my energy is leaking, all while staying organized.

9. Questions I’m Holding, Not Rushing to Answer

Not everything needs to be figured out by month one. Some answers are better earned slowly. I don’t want to rush into “adulthood mindset” with borrowed wisdom. I want to figure out what’s true for me. There’s a real pressure post grad to start talking like you’ve got it all figured out. To adopt advice. Mimic frameworks. Default into the same definitions of “success” or “adulthood” just because they’re there and everyone else seems to be nodding along. I don’t want that. I don’t want to build my early career on borrowed language or secondhand priorities. I want to invest in my future mindset and workability to be the best person I can be.

Here are a few I’m sitting with right now. Not to solve, but to stay close to:

What’s the smallest system that can keep me grounded when everything speeds up? How do I stay ambitious without letting urgency warp my attention? What actually makes a week feel good, and how much of that is under my control? When does my overthinking show up as “effort,” and how do I learn to catch it? How do I earn real trust, without performing, over extending, or burning out?

If you’re in your first job, or your first month post grad, and you’re trying to figure out how to work in a way that actually lasts, I’m right there with you. It’s easy to spiral into borrowed advice. Endless tips, routines, rules that promise productivity but rarely deliver peace. I’ve tried them. Some helped. Most just made me more anxious to become the world’s view of a “perfect person”. So here’s what I’d offer instead: Take what’s useful. Leave what’s not. Build slowly. Not for optics, but for your own clarity. No one’s system will look exactly like yours. But deep down, most of us are reaching for the same thing: to become someone who is clear. Consistent. Useful. Calm. And the earlier you start investing in that version of yourself—whatever age you are— the easier it gets to return to them when things get hard.

This is week one. We’ll keep going!!