Personal Accountability Retreat

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire. —The Accountability Stop

We’ve talked before about how time is fundamental to personal accountability and making progress on our projects.

What if we were given a free 24 hours to only work on our personal projects? How freeing and inspiring would that be? What would you want to do with all that time?

Let’s rephrase the idea more realistically—could we give ourselves permission to let go of “normal life” for 24 hours that are filled only with personal project work? 

I learned this technique from Emilie Wapnick’s Puttyverse online community. 

Serious Putty

Briefly: the Puttyverse, the Puttylike blog, and The Everything Conference are all part of Ms. Wapnick’s ongoing efforts to make connections between Multipotentialites. Multipods (Ms. Wapnick’s term and nickname) are people with more interests and talents than seem to reasonably fit into the confines of one lifetime. 

The Puttython was one of the highlights of the Puttyverse for me. A world-wide group of people would gather online to do whatever they wanted for 24 hours straight. A Zoom room was open for the whole 24 hours and various check-in times were scheduled throughout. Anyone could join or drop off. Some also wrote Puttython post threads in the forum to track their day and progress.

I used Puttythons over the years to hang art, learn to arrange flowers, organize my closets, and brainstorm ideas for a musical. It was exciting and inspiring to hear and read what everyone else was doing. Even though we were working separately on our individual goals, we were working on them together and had the support that comes from a group effort.

Build-Your-Own Retreat

Now that the Puttyverse is a fond memory for me, I actually still do Puttythons. My current accountability buddy is someone I met on Puttyverse. Occasionally we schedule our own two-person version of a Puttython. We could call it an “accountability retreat.” We pick a weekend and schedule Facetime check-ins. We decide individually what we want to do during our retreat and keep track along the way of how well we’re doing.

Benefits of this activity abound, but here are the highlights for me:

• I give myself permission to ignore everything else in life. It will all still be there 24 hours later.
• I have long time periods to focus on my projects.
• It’s a fun activity to share with my accountability buddy.
• It knocks me out of my normal routine without (necessarily) leaving the house.
• It gives me added accountability to finish a project. Especially good project candidates are ones that can fit into a day or two.

This came up today because my accountability buddy and I are in the middle of one such retreat. My goals are to make a rough demo recording of a new song and (hopefully) upload a completed musical soundtrack online.

What’s Your Account?

Have you ever given yourself permission to do whatever you want for a day or a weekend? Would you work on your projects? What kind of accountability would you need to make it work for you?