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Get Someone to Hold You Accountable

There mere act of publicly stating your goals is one way to motivate yourself to achieve them, which in turn makes you more productive. But here’s another way:

Recruit someone to hold you accountable on a daily or weekly basis. (In return, you can do the same for him.)

Here’s how it works…
Let’s say you decide to touch base with your accountability partner three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).

On Sunday night or early Monday morning, you tell your partner what all is on your to-do list for Monday. On Monday night, your partner contacts you and specifically asks you what you accomplished.

After you tell him what you did or did not accomplish, then you tell him what’s on your to-do list for Tuesday and Wednesday. Again, he contacts you on Wednesday night and you tell him what you did or did not do. And again, you tell him what’s on your list for Thursday and Friday. And so on.

You can see why this works.

Most people feel embarrassed telling their accountability partner that they didn’t finish the tasks on their to-do lists. And if you’re like most people, you’ll feel even more uncomfortable lying.

So in order to ease this psychological discomfort and embarrassment, there’s only one thing for you to do: Take action.

Tip: Be sure to choose a partner who’ll reliably contact you and hold you to your to-do list. I say this because sometimes if you tell a friend you watched TV instead of outlining a chapter, he might say something like, “Oh, that’s ok – you can do it tomorrow.”

You don’t want someone who’ll rationalize or make excuses for you (or let YOU get away with making excuses). You want someone who’ll hold your feet to the fire and strongly encourage you to stay on track.

Tags: Time Management

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