It’s easy to be a bit glib about this.

I’m imagining posting it on Facebook and getting responses from people with things like:

“Only the Lord will judge me or my wife and family or even Myself!”

So, for clarity, that’s not what I mean.

When you’re the boss, you’re not really accountable to anyone, not in a meaningful, direct way.

Because you’re the boss, right?

You can do things or not do the things, it’s up to you and the accountability you get comes later.

You’re certainly accountable for your results and if your business fails or stagnates, you’ll be the main one who has to suffer the consequences, so you’re accountable in that sense.

Back to doing the things.

Generally speaking, nobody is holding you accountable for doing the things you need to do.

Why is this important, you ask?

Because we’re all hard-wired to do certain things and to avoid doing ‘other things’. 

And often, it’s the ‘other things’ that we need to do if we want certain results – like improvement in our business.

It’s called procrastination and it’s a tendency to do the tasks we like or that are easier or more urgent rather than the tasks we don’t like or that are out of our comfort zone or that can be deferred until tomorrow without an immediate consequence.

An example is making a sales call. 

Lots of my trade business clients sell to other businesses and they need to do what I like to call ‘Relationship Marketing’ – calling people up and building a relationship.

Builders can call architects. 

Electricians, plumbers, and property maintenance businesses can call property managers and strata managers.

Construction subcontractors can call builders. 

The list goes on but I’m getting off track. 

Calling people to get work, perhaps, in the long term rather than right away, is a job that’s important but easy to defer.

You can put it off tomorrow and there isn’t much of a consequence but if you never get to it, you miss an important way to get more work and growth.

Accountability for doing the tasks (the calls in our example) is a useful tool for us.

So how can you bring some accountability to yourself?

How can you help yourself do those uncomfortable, deferrable, but important jobs?

There are a few tricks we can play on ourselves and tricks is a good word for them. 

We can’t make the jobs more urgent, we can only change how we feel about the situation.

The first thing is to acknowledge the importance of the job and write it down AND the negative consequence we’ll bear if we don’t get to them.

The next thing to do is schedule a time to do them, in your calendar. 

You’re committing to do the work now.

The challenge, of course, is that’s very easy to get to the allotted time and still not do the job – persuade yourself that you can’t stop the thing you’re doing as you have to prioritise whatever or even just ignore the reminder notification and ‘Forget’.

Remember, it’s you and your brain that’s the enemy here – you, basically, don’t want to do it.

We’ve brought in a little bit of accountability by putting it in your calendar and writing it down – accountability to yourself.

But accountability is stronger if you’re accountable to someone else and stronger still if you’re accountable to a group of people (much more embarrassing to admit to a group of your peers that you wrote it down and put it in your calendar and you still didn’t do it).

So get someone else involved to hold you accountable.

Your business coach, of course. 

Commit to doing it to me – in one of our group coaching calls or in a 1:1 call. You won’t like admitting, to me or the group that, even though you said you were going to do it, you didn’t.

And engage someone in your business, if you can, as your partner or someone close. Someone who can check in – at that scheduled time and say, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be… (whatever it is)”.

That immediacy is important – ‘immediate accountability’ is the most likely to make you stop whatever more fun/easy thing you’re doing and do the sh#!ty job that needs doing.

I’ve made a task accountability checklist.
Say, ‘Hold me… accountable’ and I’ll sling it your way.