Accountability Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of composing orchestral film scores. John Williams was one of my childhood heroes. One day a light bulb came on in my head. I thought “I’ll write a score for a book that isn’t a movie.” I chose Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy. 

At a family party, someone asked what I was doing and I said I started working on a score for Cardinal of the Kremlin. They were duly impressed and when someone else joined the conversation, my new project was announced with fanfare and pride.

One could label this public accountability: I state my goal in public to several people. So I should have felt compelled to keep working on it, right? After that party, I was asked about my project several more times. But instead of being motivated, my effort on the project dwindled and died. 

What happened? I didn’t make steady progress on the project. I felt guilty about it. So when people asked, I didn’t want to talk about it. I regretted having told anyone about it in the first place.

This happened a lot when I was young. I started many creative projects only to have them fizzle and die when shoved into the spotlight of adult interest too soon.

Looking back on it, I think there were several obstacles that stopped me from pushing forward. But one of them was a botched attempt at accountability. Public announcement of my goal didn’t help at all and ended up working against me. 

I started The Accountability Stop because we want to accomplish our goals, but don’t always know how. Many of us try accountability. We might try the “tell everyone” technique like I did. Or we might write our goals above our desks in big letters just for ourselves.  We could work out with a good friend for accountability. We might join an online writing group. 

All of these ideas might work. Or they might just as easily fail or be counterproductive! Just like my unfinished faux movie score, our best form of accountability isn’t necessarily the one that’s most popular right now. The accountability technique that my favorite writer uses may not work for me at all. Your best form of accountability is influenced by your personality and can even vary from one project type to the next.

So here’s my non-scientific, non-exhaustive list of accountability methods that you can try. They are ordered from “Most introverted” to “Most Extroverted.” I’ve given them a brief description below, and have linked to separate blog posts that elaborate more on the ideas.

• Set a start date – the obvious example is the New Year’s Resolution. By itself, it is relatively weak, but can be successfully coupled with other accountability methods.
• Set a deadline – Setting a deadline for yourself is useful, but can be more powerful if you create intermediate deadlines for progress along the way to a larger goal.
• Make an appointment or recurring appointment with yourself. A lot of accountability is just scheduling time in our lives for our projects. So take that literally, block out time in your calendar and keep that appointment.
• Journal accountability – We could call this the “Bridget Jones System,” who used her journal to (theoretically) track her progress on resolutions she had made for her life. The journal entries don’t have to be long. They could just be a checkbox for whether we worked on our project today.
• Phone app accountability – Various apps are designed to help you with accountability for the goals you have in the app, such as exercise or learning a language. They gamify the process. You get the small rewards and congratulations from the app that help motivate you. 
• Secret benchmarking – Say you want a raise and part of your strategy is working more hours. Secret benchmarking might be getting to work before your boss and not leaving until your boss leaves. You’ve not shared your goal, but you’re comparing your behavior to someone else’s anyway.
• SPUR technique – my own name for the imagined pressure we put on ourselves when we think of someone else’s reaction to a decision. Example: “If I don’t get up and sing a karaoke song tonight, my voice coach will kill me!”
• Make your project a gift. Suppose your project is something a friend of yours really wants you to do. Make it a gift for that friend. This can be a powerful motivator. You could make it a surprise gift and remain private, or you can let the friend know you’re doing it as a gift to give you motivation.
• Invest money in your goal – The bad example of this is the large number of new applicants at gyms in January of each year. Gyms make lots of money off of New Year’s resolutions that quickly fizzle. Other examples would be paying an entry fee for a 5k race, paying to reserve a booth at an art fair, or buying a plane ticket.
• Accountability buddies – Having regular check-ins with a specific person about your project (and reciprocating for their project) can be very motivating. It’s important to find the right person, though! I have had different accountability buddies in the past, and some have worked out better than others. One possible source is this Subreddit conversation devoted almost entirely to finding accountability buddies.
• A rival’s challenge can give us an “I’ll show you!” attitude that can give us lots of motivation in the right circumstances.
• Take a class or hire a coach – part of the motivation is investing money, as noted above. In addition to that, a class or a coach usually has a plan and a schedule. 
• Find a job aligned with the goal we want to be accountable for.
• Accountability groups – Study groups, work project groups, writing groups, and master minds are all forms of accountability groups that give you motivation by using natural social pressure.
• Schedule a meeting with a team. Either a team reporting to you or a team you’re on. If you’re clear about what progress you expect or what progress you are promising, scheduling a sit-down can be very motivating.
• Public accountability – announce your goal either in person (to family or friends) or online (Facebook, Reddit, etc.). You made a big grand gesture, “Hey look at me” and now you either follow through or look quite foolish. A decided downside to this approach – announcing to everyone opens you up to the snark-o-verse. Most people you know will be supportive, but won’t have a vested interest in hearing more. Others, usually cynics who don’t accomplish much themselves, take pleasure in cutting someone else’s goals down. Announcing to a smaller group of people might be better – for example, a Facebook writers group can be a more supportive and sympathetic audience than announcing to the general public.

While there are pluses and minuses to each, any of these approaches may work for you. 

What I hope you’ll take away is that you shouldn’t give up on yourself or your projects just because one accountability method didn’t work in the past. In fact, you likely have some area of your life where you feel accountable and you feel like you make forward progress. So get curious about what accountability has worked in the past for you and what works for you now.

What’s Your Account?

Do some of the accountability methods above appeal to you? Are there others that I missed? Share with the group!