Juggling Projects through Accountability

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

—The Accountability Stop

A previous article said, “Accountability is good at keeping several projects going at the same time. I typically have several projects going at once. They can feel equally important.”

I realized that’s a topic of its own to be discussed.

Life never stops so we can spend time doing what we really want to do. The things that are important to us often require more time than we have. So we squeeze our projects into the nooks and crannies of our lives. Or we literally put life on hold and block out large schedule chunks to work on our goals.

How can accountability techniques help us do that?

Juggling Act

In order to keep multiple priorities going, we need to keep them near the center of our focus and attention. One way to do that is by journalling about each of them. Using this technique, we document our progress regularly. That might be every day, week or month, depending on the project. The ritual of journaling confronts us with the reality of how much progress we’ve made and how much we have left to do. Journaling about multiple goals can help us make steady progress on each of them.

When we track our progress using a phone app, we have a periodic reminder to do the thing we said we’d do. We give the app permission to nag us about the projects or habits we said were important. When set up and used correctly, a smartphone can help us focus on what we want and actually avoid distractions. We must avoid the obvious pitfall of being distracted by the phone and all of its other toys and eye candy.

Partners in Crime

When we involve other people in each project we’re working on, we automatically have accountability built in for ourselves, whether we intend to or not. Accountability buddies and accountability groups talk to us about the goals we have for ourselves. The conversations themselves reinforce the importance of our goal. Often we discuss strategies for achieving the goal, ways to break it down into smaller components, and schedule adjustments that can help achieve the goal with the time we have.

Drop Dead

If we give each of our projects a firm deadline, we can keep it top of mind. A deadline forces us to juggle other things around to make sure we meet the deadline. One option to create a deadline is to make our project a gift for someone else. There’s nothing like a birthday or Christmas to give us mental leverage to push through and complete something.

Another way to set a deadline is to schedule a meeting with one or more people to review a draft of our book, say. It gives a concrete time that we must meet and show our progress. If we fail to be accountable, we waste other people’s time. That can be powerful motivation.

Are We on the Air?

If a project is highly important to us but we need a really big push to complete it, then public accountability may be a route to consider. Both “real life” and online-only accountability can give us that big push. It is a powerful impetus to say to the world, “I’m opening my show on January 1.”

Making Time

Ultimately, if we’re going to juggle several things at once, we must make time for each of them to happen. Typically the way to do this is to set up an appointment for ourselves to do the work. Depending on the size of the project, it may require several recurring appointments. The next most important thing is to keep the appointment.

If we have trouble keeping appointments with ourselves, we can look for a class centered around the activity we want to do. For those who are more social, the fun of being with other people and not wanting to disappoint the class or instructor keeps us going. The fact that we get to work on our project during class or as homework makes it a happy byproduct. An exercise class is a great example of exactly that dynamic.

That’s Life

Most of life is juggling one priority with another—work and home life, savings and travel, personal goals and relationships. Finding ways to do all the things we find important is a valuable life skill. Accountability techniques help us do that.

What’s Your Account?

Do you find yourself working on more than one goal at once? How do you maintain motivation and focus for all of them?