NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Accountability

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I’m trying to brainstorm ways of keeping myself accountable…(or others for that matter).

I’m in the slightly unique situation of not having to answer to anybody. This means I have no boss or anyone who will yell at me if something doesn’t get done.  If I have a bad month in terms of how much money I made, it’s literally 100% my fault. I also don’t have people which depend on me getting certain things done.

I analyzed some situations where things get done, even when you’re lazy about them:

  • In school, if I didn’t finish my homework I’d get a bad grade.
  • In a company, if you don’t finish certain things you can get fired.
  • In a company, you might have people who depend on what you’re doing, so if you don’t finish, they get mad at you.

These are all great reasons to get something done before the deadline even if you don’t want to.

So each of these has a:

  1. Task that needs to get done.
  2. Someone expecting or dependent on the task getting done.
  3. A negative consequence that happens if you DON’T finish.

I make monthly goals all the time, but I realized until I decided to blog everyday there is NO ACCOUNTABILITY for each of my goals (you may recall I openly set that goal with NevBlog readers, and in addition set a negative consequence if it doesn’t happen).  So that goal has all the elements of a task that WILL GET DONE.  But what about the others?

So I’m brainstorming some ways that I can get all my goals done:

  • Posting each goal on this blog (but what if it’s something I don’t want to be public)?
  • Get a Business Coach to discuss each goal and call me about its progress and due date (kind of like the accountability MyBodyTutor gave me for the 6-Pack Experiment which worked BEAUTIFULLY).
  • I could set a negative consequence for each goal, but it’s missing the #2 part of the formula (someone expecting or dependent on the task).

Hmmm…..so it looks like the best way is to have some sort of business coach that I speak to several times a month that keeps me accountable.

Has anyone found some great ways of keeping their goals and ALWAYS getting them done?