Create accountability to achieve your goals
We often set goals that involve only ourselves. There’s no line manager watching and waiting for you to submit your task. You don’t need to report to anyone on your progress. These goals are also referred to by Stephen Covey as the important, but not urgent tasks. They are important because they often have a long-term impact, but they are not urgent, you can move the deadline out indefinitely. In fact, the deadline is completely up to you.
Think about tasks such as writing a book. It is important because it will boost your profile within a certain topic area, and the added credibility may create other opportunities. But there is often no deadline. You can write it this year, next year or in 10 years. It is up to you to decide.
Depending on your situation, writing up your dissertation can also be classified as an important but not urgent task. Especially if you have a full year ahead of you to write up, there’s no interim external deadlines that you need to adhere to and your supervisor trusts you to take responsibility for the management of your timelines.
Other examples of important but not urgent tasks may be writing a blog post for a blog host in your area of speciality on an interesting case you dealt with, or maybe you want to update your CV and start sending it out to companies now that your doctoral degree is coming to an end. These are the type of tasks that can do with a bit of accountability and creating accountability can help you move forward towards your goals and dreams.
These are all important tasks, but they are not necessarily urgent, or not yet. Often, by the time these tasks become urgent, the consequences of not giving attention to them earlier start to show, and we feel that awful regret.
Using internal and external accountability can move your goals closer to the goalpost.
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