When Accountability Doesn’t Work
By Alex Fayle

This month’s guest post from Joely Black looks at the other side of accountability - where no matter how much you make yourself accountable to others you still don’t things done - and suggests that accountability has to come from within.

Accountability is one of those tricks used by (among others) what Rock Your Day calls ‘the productivity cult’ to get people who are reluctant to get things done. Usually, it’s a partner who regularly emails you with deadlines, and holds you to them. I suppose the idea is that if somebody else is egging you on, you’ll be more likely to get everything you need to do, done. But does it always work?

Back in the days when I was doing my PhD thesis, I had a friend who really struggled to get his work done. Every month, he’d go and see his supervisor - who happened to be the same professor who supervised my own thesis - and give him another reason why he hadn’t done the work. He used to joke that despite the fact that I’d started two years after him, I’d probably graduate before he did.

In fact, I did. Two years after I finished my thesis, we met up and he said he still hadn’t completed his work. He was running close to the eight year limitation on a full-time PhD and was faced with a very tight deadline, giving up, or being forced to give up by the university.

Although the PhD system in the UK is often tough on people who do a doctorate without working with a team and have no taught classes, he had all the support he could have asked for. His supervisor saw him regularly, wanted to see work completed on time, and from the very first year he was expected to produce research and writing of postgraduate standard. He was being provided with accountability all the time.

At the same time, a woman who had joined our office two years after I began my PhD thesis managed to complete in three years. She had two children, a husband and a part-time job to maintain. She was balancing herself between work in our department and assisting in the education department. With the same supervisor, and intensive accountability, she completed her PhD on time and graduated with a great deal of respect from the staff with whom she’d worked.

How we manage accountability will come down to, in the end, not the extent to which we have somebody else checking up on us, but how much we personally value what we’re doing. We all have our own personal value systems, and how much we rate our own expectations of ourselves, and how important it is to live up to the expectations of others.

The woman who completed in three years was a mature student, who had had to make really difficult choices in order to come back to university. She had chosen a topic that would give her an academic career and she was determined to make the best of it. She placed a great deal of value on what she was doing, so it was easy to motivate herself to manage all the aspects of her life to make them work. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of students who haven’t had the chance to really rate the value of their education, fail to meet deadlines or respond to even the best kind of support because it simply doesn’t mean that much to them.

What does that mean for accountability? I know plenty of people who sign up to have accountability partners, people who will encourage them to get tasks completed. Yet it will only work if the individual receiving it really values what’s being done, and how much they will respond to encouragement.

One alternative is to consciously shift the value of what you’re struggling to get done. I used to be really terrible when it came to doing some basic chores. I usually have a lot of other things to do, and things like cooking for myself came last - especially when I have friends who run great restaurants - and it was hard to convince myself it was worth the effort. However, when I made changes to my day, I made cooking part of the break that I needed to take from writing. I also felt as though I’d achieved something, so there was a sense of emotional engagement in what I was doing.

Of course, there are no perfect solutions to getting anything done. In the end, it will always come down to the individual finding motivation from somewhere to respond to encouragement, shift their values or raise their standards around what they’re doing.

Accountability is just one of many techniques you can add into the mix to give you another push in the right direction, when you need it.

If you are ready to be accountable and want that little push, check out the Accountability Clinic.

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