Personal Accountability

The word accountability evokes many emotions, generally negative. I understand why that is the case. It mostly refers to third parties: your employer, your family or your friends.

Something that isn't discussed as much is personal accountability or self accountability. In many ways, this is a more important form of accountability. Being accountable to you. It speaks to the promises that you make to yourself and whether or not you keep them. Keeping those important promises (we often call these promises goals) can determine our self-esteem. How we feel about ourselves. Keeping these promises and improving how we feel about ourselves can do wonders for our productivity and happiness.

Life does everything that it can to get in the way of our promises to ourselves. Often they are at the top rung of the "must-do" ladder and we feel that we must overcome all of the external rungs first before we get to it. I feel that this is the wrong way around. Because the promises to ourselves (self responsibility) generally allow us to complete other responsibilities if only we would deal without ourselves first.

The best way to keep ourselves accountable to the promises we make to ourselves is to have a system. Something that states our goals and the steps that we need to achieve these goals. Most people use todo lists to keep track of our progress but the tools we need do not have the analytics needed to tell us if we are actually making progress. New tasks are constantly added, often at a rate faster than we mark tasks as done. Understanding which tasks relate to which promise quickly devolves and we no longer "feel" progress towards our goals.

And feeling your progress is as important as the progress itself. If you went to the gym every day for 6 months but you weren't able to use a mirror to see (or feel) the progress there is no motivation to continue. It is the same with productivity. The tools do not give us a mirror to see our progress, so motivation dies and we drop our promises to ourselves.

The biggest thing that these tools lack is actually a hierarchy. Folders just don't cut it. They are too malleable and don't constrain us enough to keep our projects and tasks aligned with the goals (or promises) that we have made for ourselves.

For this reason, Angstrom exists. It is a tool to help you keep promises to yourself, it is built around the concept of the life-plan hierarchy where goals are connected to milestones. Milestones to projects. Projects to tasks (where the rubber meets the road).

It is also broken into three core sections.

• Step 1 - Plan. This is where you make the promises to yourself
• Step 2 - Work. This is where you effectively go to the gym.
• Step 3 - Analyse. This is the mirror where you get to examine your progress and keep yourself motivated so that you keep going back to number 2.

I am constantly trying to improve this analyse section. To make the mirror more effective at showing you your progress and giving you the clarity/motivation and accountability to yourself, so that you stick to your own promises.

Conclusion

Most productivity apps that exist today focus on step 2. Going to the gym. They don't take the human condition into account and realise that we need motivation/encouragement. They don't consider that accountability to ourselves is important and that we need to pat ourselves on the back from time-to-time in order to get the adrenaline rush needed to form habits (and keep going to the metaphorical gym of life). Taking responsibility for your actions isn't easy but it is the only way to change your life in the direction that you desire.