Clean Your Plate—A Bad Accountability Technique?

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

—The Accountability Stop

When I was a kid, I was excited to go “The Ground Round” restaurant because they served a sundae in an upside down plastic baseball cap. Not only did you get the sundae, but you could take the cap home.

I collected very few of these caps in childhood because my dad wisely required that I eat all of my dinner before getting dessert. That meant eating all my French fries. The French fries always got cold and I felt like I was eating mush. Usually I gave up and went home with no dessert.

Clean Your Plate Accountability

“Clean your plate,” used both literally and figuratively, is a favorite motivational tool for parents:

• You can’t watch TV until you clean your room. (I didn’t have an effective system for cleaning my room.)
• You can’t buy a new book until you read the previous one. (I was poor at picking out books I would enjoy. So I got bored and stopped reading.) 
• Finish your vegetables or you cannot have dessert.

As a result, many of us have “Clean your plate” ingrained as an accountability technique left over from childhood. We might also call it “finish what you started.” Often we hear it quoted as a means of accountability. “I’m not going to start on this next ‘fun thing’ until I finish this ‘thing that used to be fun but isn’t any more.’”

• I can’t start a new painting until I finish this one.
• I’ll start working on my garden after I clean out the garage.
• I can’t do today’s crossword until I finish yesterday’s.

When Fun Becomes a Chore

In one sense, this accountability technique is a good idea—clear your figurative plate of one project before starting another. While that goal is good, I believe the technique is mediocre at best. It may work for some people, but I doubt it’s helpful for most of us. Why? 

A project that we started because it was a priority or because we enjoyed it becomes a punishment task that we must complete.

Change Accountability, Change Your Life

My suggestion is to pair this clean plate approach with another accountability technique. Going back to our discussion of carrots and sticks, I think humans respond better to proactive and positive accountability. If our motivation for finishing one project is the promise of the next one, we’re likely to become resentful and burned out on the current project. Punishing ourselves is never fun. We’re very susceptible to saying, “I don’t feel like it.” Simultaneously, we create a sense of guilt that we aren’t working on the old project, so we don’t start the new project either—meaning we don’t do anything at all!

On the other hand, if we focus only on the current project and create proactive accountability for it, perhaps combining recurring appointments and scheduling a meeting with someone to show your completed work. Instead of beating yourself up that you’re not finished, you create mental leverage that helps you to push past resistance in the direction of your goal. 

Using the clean your plate technique, we might accidentally create a life where we continually feel like we aren’t doing what we want. We’re always catching up on tasks that became dull and we lost motivation for.

By trying other accountability techniques, we have a better chance of actually finishing the things we start. If we plan our time well, we can even overlap our projects that need finished with the exciting new project we’re dying to start.

What’s Your Account?

Are you a “clean your plate” kind of person? Or do you find yourself with twenty projects started and none finished?