Today's topic is accountability as motivation. Specifically, I'll be looking at how the tough-times of COVID-19 lock-in have weakened many accountability mechanisms that keep many of us going day-to-day. Then, I'll go into some strategies I've successfully used to keep myself motivated and working hard. My goal here is to share some info I have found useful and also to remind myself of things that have worked for me.

Let the psychologizing and rationalization begin!

Accountability: "Nagging" You Ask For

Accountability is kinda like... nagging you ask for. That is, you ask someone, some party, or some computer program to bring something to your attention (such that you can use this information to make better choices). In the moment, you may not want to hear those reminders, but you set up a system such that your past-self can help your present-self make good choices for your future-self.

For instance, family members may agree to hold themselves accountable for doing meal preparation at the beginning of the week in order to try to eat more whole foods and save money from not eating out. Accountability means reminding the people involved to keep a schedule, repeating reasons why such-and-such is a good idea, and of course each individual agreeing to do what they said they would do. More proactive accountability may include facilitating success in the project by doing appropriate shopping, finding inspirational/informative videos etc.

Lock-in Challenges

As explored in Part 8 of this series, many structured aspects of our "daily routines" are disturbed by this lock-down business. Activities taken for granted like commuting to work/school are disturbed. Also interrupted are things like physical accountability of seeing familiar faces in classrooms and workplaces.

Many businesses and institutions have done a good job continuing to do their "main service" (e.g. a school delivering cirriculum material, a restaurant serving food). However, lock-in measures have meant that many "secondary services" are interrupted. Many of these activities are important mainly for accountability. For instance, you don't really "learn anything" about Calculus from the first five or ten minutes or so of settling in class. However, this time is important for many students to figure out "was I the only one confused about question XYZ?" or "who here knows what is going on".

As activity gets reduced overall, we observe governments/corporations making distinctions between "essential" and "non-essential"; what is "essential" often coincide with the "main services" and what is non-essential is the "extra-stuff", i.e. everything you miss out on when you go to online class vs in person class.

Here I see two related problems. First, there is (1) nerd-think that school is about data-transfer of knowledge, restaurants are about food/nutrition, etc., and (2) technological obstruction of accountability.

Non-nerd think here is to say that restaurants aren't just about food, they are about atmosphere, people gathering together, and so on and so forth. School is not mainly about content-delivery, it is about learning how other people work and how society functions. Technologies like Zoom (video conferencing) impose different, often more limited channels of communication on people in workplaces, students, etc. While these channels are often adequate to convey the "primary" material of lecture content, meeting agendas, and so forth, they are often much poorer at encouraging accountability. Furthermore, in these channels, inequalities of access are magnified by students' differences in computer hardware, technical know-how, and connection speeds ¹.

What we are witnessing is a qualitatively different experience being delivered to students, workers, etc., even if nominally "the products are being delivered". As such, we must adapt our strategies to stay motivated. Studying for online class is different from studying for offline class.

Accountability as a Service

One strategy I've found helpful to stay motivated is to appreciate and use accountability as a service. By realizing how we are involved in delivering accountability to others and asking others to give us accountability, we can all work together to make the world a better place.

Locked-down times have reminded me that much of the value of institutions of things like schools and offices is the structure of accountability it delivers, rather than the "knowledge" you get there. Places where people gather are engines of social accountability to keep people moving (and hopefully, learning).

Currently, one position I am working is as a teaching assistant at a web programing bootcamp. One of the main functions of this bootcamp is to help give students structure in order to learn. Truly, you can find all the content of the bootcamp for free online; this is open source software stuff that you can learn about without paying a cent using public library Internet. However, in addition to raw technical know-how, bootcamp offers structure and accountability as a service.

Understanding my role as offering accountability as a service means that I can redouble efforts towards broader common goals, rather that over-optimizing specialist knowledge for narrow technical domains. Leaving class with students feeling empowered and prepared to read documenation and follow XYZ steps to solve some problem is a bigger accomplishment than solving some problems for a few students and having them leave class thinking "wow this is so complicated" or "alan knows a lot of stuff".

My business-book instincts tell me that this sort of idea is "leadership"; you want to offer vision and motivation to other people to move forward so you don't have to do everything yourself. Of course, there are many steps you must take to gain the trust of those working with you, but ultimately, success is in having independent actors working at solving problems you haven't even thought of yet.

During these COVID-19 times it is more important than ever to engage in accountability networks, both giving and receiving social incentives to keep stuff moving.

Competition and Care

A bit of a topic jump here—

There is another type of accountability which we are mostly all familiar with in some domain or another: competition.

Competition is very important because it means that you know at least someone cares about what you are doing—namely your rivals.

As people transition out of schooling, where there are things like sports/grades/exams/popularity to have competitions with, the metrics of competition become much more harder to discern.

One challenge I faced while being a graduate student was not really having much competition in that I was focused on pretty esoteric topics and didn't particularly need to "beat" anyone at anything (maybe write a grant proposal that means some person subjectively likes such and such better?). The accountability/motivation structure of competition just wasn't there for me because I didn't really see a point of me wanting to become "the best" in my field. Graduate school grades don't work the same way as like... undergraduate math class. I found myself enjoying taking undergraduate math classes because I needed some quantitative validation. Trading stocks and bitcoin also gave me some metrics to "compete" on.

Re-introducing competition into your life

A strategy I see for maintaining motivation during COVID-19 is to ask how much competition do I like to have? Then, if you do not have enough competition, you should find some people to create some sort of game/accountability with.

For instance:

• Find a friend that shares a hobby; make a challenge to improve (e.g. memorize such and such Chopin piano piece; have a duel in 2 weeks)
• Climb your workplace power ladder; volunteer to take up some responsibility you have not had before, and take charge
• Make a fixed plan for something you are trying to improve on: e.g. fitness goals, writing more, etc.; make it fun by agreeing to give someone 100 dollars or something if you mess up on some pre-defined terms

I think that people differ in terms of personality on how much competition they like. Many people are pretty darn comfy with virtually zero competiton, and that's fine. Growing up, I was "anti-competitive" in many ways: for instance, I enjoyed learning to juggle and having fun with some circus skills rather than succeeding in more mainstream sports ². Breaking out of this bubble after a while though, I found that I really enjoyed competition especially because it meant having more people to share experiences with.

Conclusions

Accountability is a powerful force. On one hand, establishing accountability is a powerful act of self determination in which we actively make plans for how we are going to live our lives better. On the other hand, accountability is a contract in accepting controlled unpleasantness (nagging, delaying gratification). Accountability is making plans of action to use the people, institutions, machines, etc. around us conspire for our success.

When we don't have accountability in our lives (either to ourselves or to others), we may experience more unpleasantness in more unexpected ways than we would like.

Creating structures of accountability means making us motivated to answer not just to ourselves, but also to the people around us. In doing so, stuff becomes more fun and interesting and the not-so-fun moments we experience are at least directly contributing towards some productive end. This is the stuff living is made of.