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Maybe you have been in a situation where you have told someone that you will do something, and then managed to get it done as promised. On the other hand, you might have set a task on your to do list in which others are not involved and have been postponing it for a long time, or even let it unfinished at all. You did not finish it for more than a week and are surprised and feel guilty about this. The reason for these types of sabotages about your own goals, and commitments to tasks where other people are not involved might be because of accountability and ego.
Examples of people who have already been holding you accountable until now might be your parents, older family members, professors, friends, or supervisors.
Accountability works better, because when somebody else is waiting for your response about your progress, then your ego is involved in too. You want to use this case as an opportunity to prove to the other person that holds you accountable that you are capable of doing this. You have the knowledge, the skill, the discipline and all that it takes to get this task done. Your own ego hates to get embarrassed in front of others. That is why you have the urge to commit doing the work and not waste time browsing aimlessly all day long.
You might start to think now that you once you have done a task for which a person is holding you accountable, by which you have proved that you are capable of finishing it, you are no longer supposed to prove to them about your own skills. You have already been a successful achiever. Though, you might be right that you have proved to them that you are skillful by doing it once, consistency is the key. When you are supposed to do something similar in the future, the same person might not take into consideration the past evaluations. Your past victories might be only kept in the old memories. Now you are judged by your current performance. Once again, this should invoke the ego inside you. You want to continue your strike with your consistent commitment to your goals. You want to convince the person who holds you accountable that you are not a hero only during a day. You want to tell him that you are serious and that he should have a strong sense of certainty that you are a disciplined person. You want to demonstrate him that you are responsible.
With that being said, I believe that it might be in our advantage to use ego as a motivator for our productivity. We might not need to invest a lot of money to pay someone simply because we want to be more productive. If you have something that you want to do and want to use this simple trick of taking someone you should report your progress too, then you can ask a friend, or a family member. You can also hold them accountable and help them recriprocally.
I have found myself postponing these types of goals in my own life too, and this is something that I want to work on. That is also one of the reasons why I decided to write this article, as I consider this blog as a possibility for my own improvement.
