Accountability Systems
With so many things drawing away our time and attention throughout the day, it’s often difficult to find the energy and space to fit in the things that really matter to us. One way around this is to create Accountability Systems that enforce the creation of better habits, allowing us to gradually reclaim our time and make progress towards our goals.
Editor’s Notes: This was originally meant to be a quick, short piece to discuss the tools I’ve tried for creating better habits in my life this year. It somehow ended up being a lot longer than I expected. I will publish this now either way, to get some posts out this month on time. Felt that it was the perfect topic for this entry, since I struggled to consciously make time for this blog. This will likely be a multi-segment entry, something more like a overall concept that I will be building onto as I construct my thoughts and try new things. This is therefore update ONE. - JG. 30/03/21
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Since starting this blog, I wanted to keep up my personal, self-imposed ‘promise’ of publishing two decent posts per month. In reality, I’ve often found that my immediate to-do lists are constantly filled with things which appear far more urgent than writing for my own blog. Things like university assignments, art commissions, tutoring classes, and housekeeping tasks all have due dates and far greater consequences for inaction. As a result, almost a month has passed and I’ve only written this unfinished post so far. This is just my experience, but I’m guessing its safe to assume that others face similar issues with their own projects and goals; time simply seems to slip right through our fingers. In order to reclaim my time for my own genuine interests, I tried experimenting with some Accountability Systems that might help me make meaningful progress. Most of this stuff is pretty standard habit-building knowledge, just rehashed in a manner that I found most useful and effective for me.
Accountability Systems:
An Accountability System is any type of external mechanism that acts to increase the likelihood of you completing the tasks that you have set. The key concepts here are ‘external’ and ‘increasing likelihood of completion’. Here is an exploration of these principles, things that I’ve conjectured from trying to understand why these systems worked, and under what conditions it most reliably occurred.
Firstly, an effective Accountability System should be external. This means that it cannot just be some mental note to yourself that you will ‘practice guitar every day’; speaking for myself and many others, this simply does not work. If you can actually do that and stick to it - congratulations, you probably don’t need to read this at all. For the rest of us, we need something outside of our own minds to keep us ‘accountable’; a system that exists regardless of whether we have forgotten about it, a system that is tethered to something in the real world, separate from our inconsistent emotions and thoughts. A system should not ‘fail’ when we fail; the responsibility has to be on us. Even just telling someone else about your goals already makes the goal known to the outside world. Without this external ‘anchor’, any internal goals can just be changed and adjusted to match our situation a whim. I am hugely guilty of this, constantly shifting the goalpost or ‘conditions of completion’ whenever its convenient. Systems must be external to establish any foundation of concrete accountability.
Secondly, Accountability Systems need to increase the likelihood of completion for your desired tasks. In other words, if a system doesn’t make you more likely to do the things you wanted to do, then there’s really no point in using it at all.
One way to do this is to increase the enjoyment of the task itself. This could be making the task more fun through crafting the experience, making the process easier/more efficient, or even just lowering the ‘bar for completion’ of any given thing. Something I heard from the most recent episode of Not Overthinking is that ‘you can’t necessarily make every task fun, but you can definitely make any task more fun’. Making a prettier and uncluttered desk setup, adjusting your seat to be more comfortable, setting the dumbbells up for easy use any time, playing some music when you do work, etc; these are all things that could potentially make a task either more enjoyable, efficient, or accessible, thus increasing the likelihood of completion.
Another way would be to increase the cost of inaction - to make the consequences of not completing the task more substantial. Most things that we label as ‘high priority’ are because we are compelled into action by their ‘urgent’ natures; they have a' ‘deadline’, and there are undesirable repercussions when one does not meet the requirements within that specified time-frame. Hence, university assignments and rent are both prioritised since there are tangible, significant reasons to avoid the effects of incompletion. An easy way to motivate action towards your desired goals is therefore to make inaction more painful. Whether it is a solid financial cost or any other variation of possible consequences, the point is to make you more compelled to take the ‘least painful path’ - in this case, your actual goals/tasks now becomes the ‘easier path’ compared to the increased ‘punishment’ of inaction. Where one previously had trouble with maintaining a ‘difficult habit’ of practising a particular skill every day, the cost of inaction (ie. losing money, temporarily banning other hobbies, etc) will make one more willing do the habit.
Thirdly, a true Accountability System must be self-directed and intentional. All the previous elements are well and good for creating habits, but - especially the last point about ‘cost of inaction’ - they almost seem to create a ‘forced system of task execution’, simply doing the task because you have to. The system should exist for the right reason, so that sticking to it and ‘making it work’ would actually be meaningful and enjoyable. The system means nothing if you don’t actually care that much about the things that it will accomplish (ie. even if I make an absolutely incredible routine for learning how to read latin, I personally would care much more about getting better at specific artistic or photography skills.) This obviously varies greatly for everyone, but one of the quickest routes to a failed system is when the participant doesn’t genuinely care about making progress towards that particular thing. This might sound incredibly obvious, but its one of the most common issues that we face - I do this all the time, you might do it too. The question is whether or not we are intrinsically motivated to want this ‘thing’; does the desire to progress towards this goal come from personal interest and genuine understanding of benefits/costs, or is it an external, socially-inherited desire? Essentially, do you want the thing, or do you want to be seen to want the thing? Truthfully answering this question allows the development of much stronger systems of authentic commitment.
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This is mostly it for the first update of this topic; there will be more to come. Next update (potentially very soon) will outline the specific usage cases and practical manifestations of all these conceptual principles - the system of ‘Accountability Partners’.
I’m also trying actively to put out pieces that I would normally consider ‘incomplete’ or ‘subpar’; I want to consciously fight that ‘inner critic’ and debilitating perfectionist attitude, in order to simply create more, to express more. This is a small victory in itself: I’ve both managed to publish something before the turn of the month into April, AND I’ve begrudgingly overcome the constant Impostor Syndrome that is afraid of showing my imperfect creations to the world.
See you soon. For real this time. Holding myself accountable.
- JG.
