Having your feet held over an open flame may sound like a bad thing, but most of us benefit from being accountable to someone. Whether it’s the board we serve, the boss we report to or the constituents that count on our services, asking someone to rate our performance is a sure-fire way to improve that performance. If you want to make real and lasting improvements, tell your ‘accountability partner’ and yourself that that there will be no excuses for your nonperformance. That is, they are not to accept an answer like, “There wasn’t time after all,” or “I made progress but I missed the deadline.” A good partner will ask why there wasn’t time or why you didn’t finish, rather than simply saying, “Oh, well, maybe you’ll get to it next month.”

Self-imposed deadlines may work for a few of us, but most of us need someone else’s expectations to keep us moving forward. It’s hard to let down someone else.