Accountability is a tough nut to crack. It can be a powerful tool when employed to get something done, but creating the right circumstances for it is difficult. Moreso when one is creating in a solo environment with no external pressures keeping deadlines in tact and work moving forward. It’s one of the larger pitfalls of functioning independently. It might also be one of the benefits.
What I mean is, when I want to accomplish something I need to find a mechanism for motivating myself when I’m exhausted. Having a family and a fulltime job can really take the wind out of my sails and make noodling around on the endless expanse of the internet more attractive than settling in to record something. One of the better motivators for me in recent memory was my commitment to post a new sketch, not a finished product, every Thursday. I stuck to that and it worked for quite a while. Well, until I was beaten down by a massive heat wave in June. That coupled with air conditioning failures more or less derailed most of my non-survival related activities. But my Thursday posts were something that I used to keep myself honest and they were a great idea. Yay me.
The only detractor to my weekly post was the lack of specificity. I had to post “something.” It didn’t have to be coherent or move any of my larger projects along, it simply had to exist. From a certain point of view that’s plenty good enough but if there is a larger goal in mind (like an album or collection or large scale work) I might have actually lost ground while appearing to make progress. The head games are all very tricky.
So why not simply lay out my end game and mark progress toward it? A lot of reasearch types have indicated that in some cases talking about something gives people the same charge as having done it. It’s like having the idea is enough and once we’ve communicated it the execution becomes unnecessary. I know I have allowed myself to fall into that more than once. My old journals are littered with references to projects that never went anywhere.
If telling someone about something makes me less likely to do it and doesn’t necessarily add any accountability then how does this work? Like everything else in life it comes down to personal discipline. The only person who can really hold me accountable is me. I’m really the only one who cares if I ever write another lick of music. I’m the only one who cares if it’s any good. The rest of the world would be perfectly happy to have me trot along with the other things I’m doing and could not care less about my urge to compose or record.
Accountability is about the person doing the work. It’s about me.
This stuff always sounds painfully hokey and I would ignore it if it weren’t completely true. But it is. My next trick is to come up with a way to make it work for me. Find a way to strike that balance and use the world around me to keep me moving while it’s trying to get in my way. There’s a hack in there somewhere and I will find it.
If anyone is listening, do you have any clues?
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