Personal Accountability Reset Button?

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

—The Accountability Stop

Sometimes life knocks us for a loop. We feel disoriented and ungrounded. All the things we said we would do get thrown out the window as we try to deal with some big hairy problem that life dropped in our lap.

I just spent two weeks with a bacterial infection. I was only barely functional. I could work about half a day at a time from home. Everything in life—cleaning, bills, friends, even this blog got put on hold.

When we come out the other side of it all, how do we start again? When all our personal accountability is thrown to the side, how do we get back to our routines? Does life come with a reset button?

We talked before about failing to be accountable and some strategies to deal with that. We’ve talked about being accountable when we’re not at 100% as well. But when we’ve broken off from accountability all together, how do we reconnect with it? If we feel guilty because we didn’t do all the “shoulds” we promised ourselves, does it spiral out of control to “I can’t do anything, why bother?”

Review Priorities

Often after we’ve dealt with a life crisis, we have a different perspective on our goals. Our priorities may have shifted. Our motivations may be different. We can take this opportunity to consider our projects, goals, and why we want to do those things. What’s different for us now? Do some projects seem more important and others less so? We can let the answers guide us on how to re-engage with accountability.

We might find that some goals must be delayed in order to deal with more urgent priorities. It can be freeing to let go of a goal that may be too heavy of a lift right now.

For me personally, this recent disruption has me reevaluating a music writing goal I had for the end of the year. It wasn’t going as quickly as planned prior to my illness. At this point, I’m willing to reset the deadline for this project out beyond the end of the year and give myself a break.

Be Realistic

Even if we want to continue with all the same goals we had before, we should be realistic about how much time and energy we have. Reconnecting with goals sometimes causes us to work ourselves into a frenzy and, eventually, into the ground.  When we start back into our goals, we should pace ourselves and not dive right back into the deep end of the pool. Start slow instead. 

Remember to also include time to just be. That may be a formal time like meditation. It could also be informal time to relax, unplug, and recharge. Maybe take walks without an exercise goal attached. Or take a nap. Or doodle or color. Unprioritized time can make the rest of our time more productive.

Keep It Simple

What’s the most basic way that you keep yourself on track? Maybe your calendar, a task tracker app, or just a simple paper list. Use only that one system if you can. Simplify as much as possible to stay focused on only your most important work. 

Even though I feel much better in the past three days, I realized I completely missed an appointment on my calendar yesterday. A simplified system for me is returning to a Bullet Journal to get myself back on track.

As nice as it would be to have a real reset button, hopefully some of these techniques can help us if we find ourselves starting over from scratch.

What’s Your Account?

Have you had significant interruptions in your life that required you to reset your accountability priorities? How did you handle it?