Accountability is a good thing… until it becomes reliability

When you are first starting out on forging a new routine, external accountability can be beneficial. Like meeting a friend at the gym on certain days of the week. If you don't show up, you get that phone call.

"Where are you?"

For writers, that external accountability can be used to help keep you on track with your self-imposed writing deadlines. Or it could be as simple as showing up for that write-in and buckling down to write.

However, there is a danger that accountability can shift to reliability.

Let's say that you've been going to the gym regularly with a particular friend, but that friend is going on holiday out of town. Are you the type of person who keeps going to the gym anyway, or do you find an excuse—any excuse—to not follow through on an established routine? If you're the one to find an excuse, then you have slipped into the realm of reliability.

Identifying reliability

Identifying when things have moved from accountability into reliability is not always easy. The habit that we've forged, like going to the gym with a friend, could be highly beneficial to our physical and mental well-being. We feel good. We feel energized. But it's not until that person we've been relying on suddenly disappears from the equation that we have the potential to see where things went wrong.

When you are reliant on someone else to help you maintain your routine, be it in-person or online, then that routine is no longer sustainable.

Healthy, sustainable habits are self-motivated. There might be an external accountability component to them, particularly in the beginning while you're forging those habits, but eventually your own subconscious should be able to continue the habit without those external factors.

Without this self-motivation, anything could derail the progress that you've made.

Dealing with reliability

So, what do we do when we have moved into reliability? Well, first you need to recognize that this phenomenon has happened. Then you have to be willing to change it. From there, you have the most difficult job of all: breaking a habit that, in fact, might make you feel good.

There are no easy solutions to breaking habits. If there were, then you wouldn't see all those anti-smoking regimes or the multitude of diets. There are some people who will profess that going cold turkey is the best practice, but others recommend that you ween yourself. And there are other strategies that replace one habit with another one, hopefully one that is more sustainable and healthier.

I'm a self-motivated person

I'm unable to give you advice on how to break habits that have been forged based on reliability, shifting them back to accountability. I, myself, have always been a self-motivated person, using external tools, not people, to track my progress, becoming obsessed with the numbers of it all. It's the scientist in me.

I have always been able to motivate myself to do something—if I can see the benefit in it for me. But I will admit that sometimes I become so obsessed with an idea, even to my detriment.

My writing and accountability buddies are only there to help me see reason when the self-doubt monster strikes or when I become so obsessed with something that it's no longer healthy. At the end of the day, I control my routines and productivity.

Accountability for writers is a good thing

Accountability is always a good thing to have in your life, and I strongly recommend that new writers seek out those support networks where they can eventually forge writing buddy relationships. But be careful with the reliability factor.

At the end of the day, the only one that you have to make happy with your writing journey is yourself. As such, it all comes down to you.