When it comes to doing things for other people, I am steadfastly accountable. I try to never let anyone down or shirk any responsibility that may affect another person. When it comes to being accountable to myself … I struggle.

I think that one reason that I—and probably other people as well—are not accountable to ourselves is because disappointing ourselves doesn’t feel as impactful as disappointing other people. We think that we are only affecting our lives negatively so somehow that makes it ok. The problem, at least in my case, is that I still get mad at myself for not accomplishing my goals so it creates both disappointment and anger directed inwards which clearly is not great.

This is something that I want to change and as part of this I’m going to list things that I plan to do to become more accountable. In the future I’ll make an update to this post telling you what worked and what didn’t.

1. I’m going to make concrete deadlines for myself. I’m hoping that if I have deadlines that I tell myself that I cannot change that this will help me keep my word to myself. In the past, I’ve fallen into, what I consider a trap, of larger goals that I say I will complete—by the end of the week, in the month of March, or before the summer. This strategy may work for some people but having flexible deadlines just means that I put goals off indefinitely.

2. I’m going to keep better track of my goals. I’ve somewhat cheated on this one as I’ve already started it, however, I would like to keep actual physical track of things in a visual way. So far, creating a little tracker in my agenda has keep me accountable for a few minor tasks that I should do each day to make my life better. This was not a new idea on my part as I was, of course, inspired to try this by the many bullet journal examples in various places on the internet. I don’t know if this would work as well for tasks that take more than 10 minutes but so far just being able to look at the agenda and have a physical reminder that I haven’t yet drank my water allotment seems to be enough to get me to get my butt in gear to get that check mark.

My SO and I have decided that we are going to try to make being accountable to each other for our personal goals a priority. For us, this means dedicating some time each day to our own individual projects and then coming together after this time to report on our progress. We have different reasons for being accountable to each other—I struggle to make my tasks a priority while he struggles with setting end goals—but even though we are coming from different places we hope that setting aside this time will make it so that we feel the need to have accomplished something.

Do you have any ideas for remaining accountable to yourself that you think are better than what I’ve written? Do you have different reasons that you struggle to be accountable to yourself? Leave it in the comments below!