Table of contents
I've noticed for some time that while I strictly follow goals and habits in the first few weeks, there is a point when small exceptions are made, and eventually, piece by piece, everything almost returns to the starting position.
Therefore, me and a good friend decided to have weekly video calls. They consist of following up on our set goals and talking about what to improve in the future.
No professional coach.
No money spent.
Every Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., we have a 20-minute accountability meeting.
My favourite Calendar App
I put it in my new favourite calendar app called Fantastical. Fantastical has Natural language processing. You can write "Write Blogpost about Accountability Partner from 9 am till 10 am tomorrow."
It will then automatically schedule the activity "Write Blogpost about Accountablity Partner" into your calendar from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. for the day of tomorrow.
3 simple Accountability Meeting Questions
- What went well last week?
- What would I like to improve?
- What were my key learnings?
3 Simple Daily Goals
- 8h sleep/day
- Physical Challenge
- Mental Challenge
More on what is meant by Physical and Mental Challenge later.
Template we use to track our Progress in GoodNotes:
As my Accountability Buddy and I have the same 3 daily goals, we created a shared template on GoodNotes. This allows us to follow each other's progress between the weekly meetings.
3 Daily Goals Detailed Description
Sleep: I track the hours of sleep per night with my Oura Ring Gen3.
Lukas
Blogpost on my experience with the Oura Ring Gen3
Physical Challenge: This can be any activity where you physically challenge yourself, like HIIT training or going for a 10km run.
Mental Challenge: I got this idea from Andrew Huberman. He talks about an activity that is ideally somewhat unpleasant because of the mental effort you have to put in. It is not about reaching a goal but rather about the process of having to use your brain to do a difficult task.
Examples are reading a scientific paper or solving Sodokus.
10-second summary
An Accountability Partner helped me stick to my goals over the long term. We track our goals daily via GoodNotes using a synchronized template and have a video call every week. There, we analyze our progress.