Being Accountable
Making yourself accountable to your creative pursuits can often be easier said that done. Us hobbyists and enthusiasts want to finish that project, but obstacles prevent us getting there sometimes.
However, if you really do value producing creative work, and the only obstacle is a time constraint, then there is one solid method for creating good, productive work more frequently — accountability.
My Experiences with Accountability
Personally, I’ve never had much of a problem with writer’s block or struggling to create work — mine’s always been in completed creative output. Up until early 2019, I had about 350–400 songs at various stages of completion, with only 3 completed songs to share with the world. With that, you can see a clear disparity between starting and finishing.
Fast forward to early 2020 and I’ve got 23 or 24 songs on Spotify, which at the very least denotes some kind of shift. Has it been sea change? Not particularly. It’s been more of a case of tweaking my philosophy on starting and finishing work. So, how has accountability helped?
Making Accountability Work for You
So, there’s a bunch of things I’ve read up on that can support you in making yourself accountable to finish stuff. which I’ve decided to put into practice, with positive effects. Here were the three that grabbed my interest, the first two of which I ended up doing:
- Put your ego on the line (tell everyone what you’re doing, and when it’s going to be ready)
- Put your money on the line (Tell your boss to take £500 out of your pay cheque if you fail to meet the deadline)
- Set up a negative consequence of failure (such as donating to a political party you hate, for example)
What I Did
A friend of mine, Lizzie, talked about the value of the three month goal (she knows her stuff about accountability, check it). I took that as an opportunity to do something overly ambitious — write an 11 track album in three months. Bold, stressful and fun, three things I can really get behind.
If I risked the potential of being publicly seen as someone who doesn’t finish things he vowed to, my pride would take a bit of a dent. Equally, if I put money on the fact I was going to get stuff over the line, then I would suffer a little bit financially if I failed.
I was instructed to tell everyone who cared enough to call me out if I was failing and give me good moral support on the journey, too. So I told everyone and across the three months, I was amazed at how many people were checking up on my progress. I don’t talk about myself a lot but the attention made me feel like I was doing something really worthwhile.
My boss at the time was pretty helpful with it. I told him to take £500 out of my salary for the month if I didn’t make the album by the goal date. That was enough money to cause a fair bit of stress for me.
What I Learned
There was a whole bunch of strategies I learned by accident across that 12 weeks before getting my music finished, and there was plenty I learned from the process.
For starters, I’d quickly gone from being someone who had started and finished 3 projects, to someone who had done 14. There were some amazing lessons from that alone.
More importantly, I’d got a little more clarity on how to finish things you started. I found that I’d never finish everything, but I got better at finishing those where I thought I had a high chance of gaining momentum.
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