The case for being inconsistent, on purpose
You've been told that consistency is the whole job. What if going quiet is part of it too?
I missed two weeks of The Case recently.
Not in a dramatic “I need to step away” way, not with a note or an explanation or a pinned post about taking care of myself. I just didn’t post, and then I came back (hi!) and we carried on.
And surprise: the world didn’t stop, my inbox didn’t flood with concern, and this didn’t combust. Because there’s a version of this story where that’s proof that nobody cares, that you’re more replaceable than you thought, that the algorithm swallowed your audience whole while you were off living your life. But there’s another version - one where the silence isn’t absence, it’s space.
The consistency myth.
Every content creator gets told some version of the same thing early on: consistency is the whole job. Show up every day, never miss a week, feed the machine. And I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong - it isn’t. Consistency builds trust, it trains your audience to expect you, it tells the algorithm you’re worth distributing.
But “be consistent” and “be always available” aren’t the same thing.
Always available means no gaps, no silence, no admitting that you’re a person who sometimes runs out of things to say, it means scheduling content when you have nothing to say because the calendar says Monday and Monday means a post and it means performing presence rather than actually being present - and audiences can feel that difference, even if they can’t name it.
There’s a reason Margot Robbie quietly stepped back after the Barbie press tour. She’d been everywhere, all at once, for months - and rather than keep going, she said publicly that she thought people needed a break from seeing her. Not because anything was wrong but because she understood something most of us are slow to apply to ourselves: overexposure is its own kind of damage, and sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is let people miss you.
Your audience should miss you sometimes.
I think about this differently than I used to. The goal of a content strategy isn’t maximum presence - it’s meaningful presence. And you can’t create meaning if you never leave any space for it.
When you’re always there, you become wallpaper. The feeling of “oh, she’s back” only exists if there was a moment of “where did she go?” - and that moment of noticing you’re not there is a signal that something’s been built. You don’t notice the wallpaper when it disappears.
The creators I feel most connected to aren’t the ones posting every day. They’re the ones who show up when they have something to say, whose content feels considered rather than compulsory, and who I look forward to hearing from because I’ve learned that when they do turn up, it means something.
What intentional inconsistency actually looks like.
This isn’t a case for going AWOL. There’s a difference between disappearing and deliberately stepping back:
Disappearing is reactive: life got busy, motivation ran out, you burned out and went quiet without meaning to. It breeds guilt, and guilt makes the coming back harder than the leaving ever was.
Intentional inconsistency is a choice you make in advance.
At the start of April, I had one of the busiest content periods I’ve had in a while - teasing the waitlist for Scroll Forward (our first ever in-person conference, in London this September), then announcing it, then rolling out a two-week content plan to introduce what it actually was and why it mattered. It was a lot of showing up, and it was intentional.
And then I stopped. For a week and a half, I didn’t post anything.
Also intentional.
I didn’t want to rush past the moment - I wanted Scroll Forward to sit in people’s minds without immediately being buried under the next thing. I wanted people to notice the quiet, to feel the absence of the content they’d been getting, so that when I came back, it meant something - it means that that the value of showing up in this space, and the value of showing up in person at Scroll Forward, felt sharper for having been away from it. Absence heightens. It reminds people what they actually want from you, in a way that constant presence never can.
That’s what intentional inconsistency looks like: your content should ebb and flow with what you’re building and where you are. Some periods deserve full volume and some deserve silence - knowing which is which, and having the confidence to act on it, is a strategy.
The algorithm question.
Yes, algorithms reward regularity. Yes, taking a break can dent your reach. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But reach and relationship shouldn’t be confused. Reach is how many people saw a post, relationship is whether the people who follow you actually care when you’re gone. And if you’ve been building community rather than just an audience - which is a whole other piece, but stick with me - a two-week gap isn’t catastrophic. The people who are really yours will still be there and the people who weren’t going to convert anyway weren’t going to convert regardless of how many times you showed up.
The longer I do this, the more I think the obsession with never missing a post is actually an anxiety response dressed up as a strategy. It’s the fear that if we stop, we’ll discover nobody cared enough to notice - and so we never stop, because then we never have to find out. But you already know what always being there feels like. What if you found out what being missed felt like instead?
Case closed.
I came back from two weeks off and nothing had burned down. And actually, I think I wrote this one better because of it. Your content schedule is allowed to look like a person made it, because one did.
I'll be back next week, and the week after that. But I'll also go quiet again when it's right to - and when I do, I hope you notice.
I needed to read this just at the right time. I came back to build my own professional site after a really long company supervised period and first I was panicking, but now I think its just fine. Thank you for this !