Shiny New Accountability System!

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

—The Accountability Stop

I love to-do lists. I love to write things down and cross them all off. It’s satisfying.

Sometimes I change around my to-do lists. Often they’re paper, because I like the tactile feeling of the pen crossing off the to-do. Lists that are too long or too long-term may be better served by a spreadsheet or an app. And sometimes I just like the fun of having a different to-do list.

With our latest quarterly review, my accountability buddy (AB) and I started a new system. We each previously kept our own lists of goals for the quarter. We both were a bit stressed about keeping up with the other buddy’s list and how to be supportive of that. This quarter, we’re trying a shared page where we list our goals together. 

We Have a Notion

My AB hooked me up with the web app Notion. It’s an uber-customizable personal productivity app. My AB used it to create an accountability home page for us to view while we do our weekly check-ins. We each customized our column with information and check-boxes to support our specific goals and our method of tracking progress. Here’s a template version of how it looks:

We can see how different goals might require different approaches. Buddy 1 has habit goals that want to be tracked—“did this happen this week?” Buddy 2 has goals that will create new steps that are updated each week.

Shiny Objects

The result? For me, it’s been a lot of productivity. Having our goals so visible to each other gives me a lot of motivation to check off the items. But if I’m honest, it’s also just a fun new system of tracking! It’s a shiny new thing that made old tasks feel fun again.

Don’t underestimate the power of pizzazz.

Julia Morgenstern, Professional Organizer and Author

Ms. Morgenstern was referring to physical organizing systems when she said that. But I think it applies just as well to to-do lists. We might think it’s a little scatterbrained to keep switching systems, but who cares? If it helps us to get things done, do it—whatever it is! We can’t worry about other people in our lives and what they might think. This is for us and for our projects.

A possible downside is that we may have to-do lists of different formats everywhere and none of them get done. In David Allen’s language, we don’t trust our system. We don’t have a consistent place to look to know what to do next. At that point, we need to decide on one place to keep our to-dos and focus on just one. Maybe a to-do item will be “find and consolidate to-do lists!”

Fear of too many to-do lists shouldn’t stop us from trying something new if we want. One never knows how a new approach to tasks might change our results.

What’s Your Account?

Have you changed up your accountability tracking recently? Did it help you to be more productive?