Are You On Track With Your Resolution?
The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Help Your Productivity
By chris danilo on Dec 18, 2017 05:50 am
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It’s not a tool, or an app, or a mentor.
It’s not a journal, or a habit, or a thought.
It’s the one thing that can keep you in check when your brain lets things slide.
It’s the one thing that will have your back when you want to hit the snooze button.
Truthfully, it’s the one thing that will keep you accountable to your goals.
It’s a person.
It’s a specific kind of a person.
It’s an accountability buddy.
The habits, the thoughts, and the tools will all come with daily effort – as long as you put in the effort.
It turns out, it’s a lot harder to let someone else down than to let you down.
It’s almost January, people. Get a gym buddy. Get a novel-writing buddy.
Quick Methods for Staying Accountable:
The Idea Tax
If you have an idea, set up some consequences that go along with it. What happens if you take action? What happens if you don’t? It’s easier for your accountability buddy to follow through on your reinforcement, and for you to follow through on theirs. This prevents “cheating.”
2 Day Project
Pick 2 days on the calendar. On day one, it’s all about your accountability buddy. Focus on their idea, and come up with as many action items as possible with them. Then, help them execute as many as possible for an entire day. On day two, it’s all about you. You both work together on your project and move forward as fast as possible. This works because it’s a lot easier to come up with action items for other peoples’ ideas than it is for our own.
Create Action Items with Why, When, & Where.
When people say “I will do . . .” only 29% of people actually follow through.
When people say “I will do . . . because . . .” that number jumps to 39%.
And get this, when people say “I will do . . . because . . . on . . . day . . . at this time . . .” that number jumps up to 91%.
Don’t just say you’ll do it. Tell your accountability buddy why, when, and where you’re going to do it.
2 Minute Action:
Call someone whom you can trust to have your back. Tell them about one idea you want to execute and when you’d like to have it finished. Then ask them what goal they want to achieve at the same time. Set up mandatory checkpoints and put something on the line (like a cash penalty or a gift reward).
If no one comes to mind, scroll through your phone contacts of Facebook friends and find someone.
If you still can’t find someone, go online. We live in an absurdly connected world. Google, for 2 seconds, and you’ll find meetup groups, accountability groups or what have you. For example, here’s a group of people who keep each other accountable for getting their novels written in 30 days.
You’re not reading this blog because you’re the kind of person who makes excuses.
You’ve got this.
As always, reach out if you need anything. You can reply here, email me, tweet at me, or message me on Facebook.