When I was a developer, I looked down on the value of consistency. I was wary of getting so comfortable with doing something steadily that I stopped actually growing.
But once you step into other fields, the value of doing something consistently shoots up. I feel it in exercise and in playing an instrument.
In exercise, there is a concept called grease the groove (GTG). 1 It means cutting a groove: you develop a skill by doing a little of it, consistently. When you're trying to increase your pull-up count, for example, you frequently do a number of reps short of the point where you'd fail.
It feels similar to distributed learning.
Things worth doing consistently
That said, it's hard to do everything consistently. The things you stick with carry a fairly high adaptation cost at the start. There are many things in life we resolve to keep doing, but introducing them successfully is not easy. Atomic Habits explains well a good approach to turning something into a habit. Below is a list of things I think are worth doing consistently.
Footnotes
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The concept was created by Pavel Tsatsouline. ↩