How to Hold Yourself Accountable: Personal Accountability in Life

Holding yourself accountable means engaging in self-discipline to complete both old and new goals. Successful people rely on a host of different strategies to keep themselves focused and on track to complete all their tasks on a daily basis. While this might sound like additional stress in theory, it makes your life a lot easier in a pragmatic sense.

When you hold yourself accountable, you resolve to live and work in a more manageable and measurable way. This allows you to accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively than you would otherwise be able to with a more laissez-faire and procrastination-prone approach.

If you stay on task and complete everything you need to in a given day, you can rest easy knowing you did everything possible to set yourself up for success in the long run. Keep these three benefits in mind as you learn to hold yourself accountable:

1. 1. Greater productivity: Staying on track to complete short-term goals allows you to get through longer-term initiatives in a more succinct timeframe. Doing more to plan ahead and stay the course up front helps shorten your workload and free up more time in the future. While it might take time to start seeing this benefit of self-accountability in real time, you’ll slowly but surely lay a process in place to improve your productivity overall.
2. 2. Increased confidence: As you set goals and achieve them, you’ll feel more confident about getting through each and every workday. This empowers you to dedicate more time on important decision-making or tending to your mental health than accomplishing tedious and mundane tasks you procrastinated on earlier in the week. This innate sense of confidence will build on itself more and more over time.
3. 3. Less stress: Holding yourself accountable is hard work, but it should make the rest of your workload easier. After you set goals for yourself, sticking to them in a timely manner ultimately equates to less stress overall. Playing catch-up is almost sure to increase your stress levels beyond what you would have experienced if you had simply paced yourself and stayed on target. Make it a personal mission statement to take baby steps each day rather than trying to sprint to the finish line the night before your deadline.

Holding yourself accountable might take a little practice at first, but it’ll pay off markedly in the long run. Remember these tips as you strive to hold yourself accountable:

• Ask for feedback. Turn to mentors for advice about holding yourself accountable. Odds are, your supervisors or other trusted advisors have their own processes for staying on task and completing what they need to from one day to the next. Take their wise advice and apply it to your own daily routine however you see fit.
• Get an accountability partner. Sometimes you need a fellow peer to stay the course from one day to the next. Choose a reliable friend or coworker with a similar set of goals to be your personal accountability buddy. Check in with each other throughout each workday or workweek to make sure you’re both focused on the tasks at hand. A relationship like this is all about give and take, so help your accountability partner in the same way you want them to help you.
• Practice self-care. Hold yourself accountable when it comes to giving yourself a break, too. Rest is a formative aspect of a healthy lifestyle, and it’s necessary to maintain the right mindset moving forward with accountability in other areas of your life. Use mindful moments and positive affirmations to keep going from one hour to the next. The ideal form of self-care is whatever you think will work best for you to recharge and get ready for another day of diligent work.
• Recognize when you’re procrastinating. Learn to notice when you are procrastinating in the first place and nip it in the bud. Procrastination is one of the main enemies of self-accountability. Stick resolutely to your time management strategies and get back on track as soon as you notice you’re letting yourself drift away into distraction.
• Reward yourself. Whether you meet all your short-term work goals for a day or stick to a New Year’s resolution all the way to December 31, reward yourself for remaining diligent and working hard every day. Self-accountability requires effort and delayed gratification, so remind yourself there’s something positive you’re working toward at the end of every goal.
• Set both short-term and long-term goals. When it comes to completing a project, set a long series of micro-goals that add up to one big goal. Completing small goals feels far less daunting than tackling an entire endeavor from start to finish. As each one builds on the last, it becomes easier to see the ultimate finish line and motivate yourself to reach the end. By staying on top of one small goal at a time, you break up your workload into manageable increments until you reach your long-term goals.
• Stay organized. Use apps for keeping track of your work and program them to notify you when you need to get things done. Keep your workspace clean and free of clutter. Sync up your calendar with anyone else who’s working on the same project so you can hold each other accountable.

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