Accountability

Accountability starts with a problem or an area of life, rather than with a task list. Pick the area, name the commitments you are making in it, with dates and a status on each. They flow into your actions, so they get prioritised alongside everything else rather than sitting in a separate list you forgot about. Two things make a commitment more likely to happen: writing it down with a date attached, and somebody else knowing about it. The first you can do here. The second is worth doing on purpose. For example, telling your coach or your partner or another person that the commitment affects. The research runs through goal-commitment work. That's Locke and Latham again, where commitment is what makes a difficult goal useful rather than abandoned, and through behaviour-change studies on public commitment and follow-through. Dates matter more than people expect. 'I will sort out my pension' may have been on some people's lists for years. But 'I will call the provider on Thursday morning' either makes it happen or visibly not, and it's the visibility that creates progress, because you find out what has actually happened and what's actually in the way. Keep the list short and the dates real. A commitment that you have missed three times is a decision you have made to miss it. Review it weekly.