Accountability: how to make commitments you actually keep

Personal accountability means naming what you've committed to, putting a date on it and checking in on it regularly, ideally with someone else who knows about it. Goal-setting research shows that commitment is what makes a challenging goal work, and a 2016 review of the evidence found that keeping track of progress helps even more when that progress is shared with other people. PiViva's Accountability tool sorts your commitments by area of life and feeds them straight into your actions.

Why do the same things stay on your list for years?

"Sort out my pension." "Update my CV." "Book the dentist." "Have that conversation with my brother."

Some of these have probably been on a list somewhere for a very long time. They're important, but they're never urgent, and without a date there's never a moment when they visibly don't happen. They simply roll forward from one list to the next.

So they sit there, costing you a small pang of guilt every time you see them. And the longer they sit, the bigger they seem to grow, until a twenty-minute phone call starts to feel like a mountain.

What does the research say about accountability?

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's long programme of research on goals is clear that commitment is what makes a difficult goal useful. When people aren't really committed, hard goals tend to be abandoned somewhere along the way.

Two things seem to help commitment along: writing the commitment down with a date, and letting someone else know about it.

There's a study that gets quoted a great deal on this subject. In 2007, Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California presented findings showing that people who wrote their goals down, made commitments and sent weekly progress reports to a friend achieved more than people who simply thought about their goals. It's an encouraging result, though it's worth knowing that it was a conference presentation and wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal.

You may also have come across a figure claiming a "95% chance of success" if you have an accountability partner. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an original study behind that number, so it's best taken with a pinch of salt.

The stronger evidence comes from Benjamin Harkin and his colleagues, whose 2016 meta-analysis brought together 138 studies. Monitoring progress made people more likely to reach their goals, and the effect grew when progress was reported to others or made public.

How does Accountability work in PiViva?

Accountability starts with an area of your life or a problem you'd like to solve. You pick the area, name the commitments you're making in it, and give each one a date and a status.

Those commitments flow straight into your actions, so they're prioritised alongside everything else you're working on and don't get lost on a separate list.

The dates matter more than most people expect. "I will sort out my pension" can sit on a list for years, whereas "I will call the provider on Thursday morning" either happens or doesn't, and you'll know which by Thursday lunchtime. That clarity is what helps things move, because it shows you what's really standing in the way.

It helps to keep the list short and the dates realistic. If a commitment has slipped three times, it's worth gently asking yourself whether it still matters, and if it does, what would need to change for it to happen this time.

What if you're keeping your commitments to yourself?

Then it may be worth telling someone, on purpose. That could be your partner, a good friend or a colleague whom the commitment affects, and it could also be a coach. If you're working with a coach from the PiViva Coach Directory, you can share your commitments with them, so they can see where you've got to before each conversation.

A weekly look at the list keeps things moving, and the Weekly Success Planner is a natural place to do it. If one commitment keeps slipping despite your best efforts, the Procrastination Killer can help you find out what's going on underneath.

Little by little, the things that have sat on your list for years can start to come off it, and there are very few feelings quite as satisfying as that.