This month, a couple of Intrinsic Digital members recruited willing participants in a social experiment: log and track your choice of one daily goal and share your progress publicly.
Why make habit tracking public?
Accountability is a powerful psychological tool that drives us to complete tasks and achieve our goals. However, when it comes to maintaining self-accountability for personal goals, our discipline can oftentimes waiver. We are generally more prone to honor commitments made to others than to ourselves.
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When we make our goals public, however, we generate a sense of responsibility to follow through. This phenomenon is rooted in social psychology, where the fear of letting others down or facing public embarrassment acts as a strong motivator.
The magic behind a spreadsheet
Intrinsic Digital members harnessed this tactic to level up their goal-setting. The challenge was simple: choose one task to complete each day and after completing the activity, choose from an array of emojis to mark your activity as complete in the shared Excel sheet. Each participant was also paired with a designated "hype person" to help build an accountability loop of encouragement and support.
Reflections
The dedicated Teams chat channel gave us a space to provide support, encouragement, and celebrate our daily wins. Plus, it also helped us house motivational quotes and memes we found on the internet to continue crushing our goals!
Some key takeaways from this exercise:
- Keep goals realistic & SMART—
(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) - Select goals that motivate YOU
- Learn from failures
- Practice self-compassion
- Share strategies
- Aim for small but consistent
- Celebrate small wins
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Fostering mental health at a workplace
Intrinsic Digital is a big believer in creating mental health opportunities for its employees. The fulfillment of personal goal-setting cannot but help enrich one’s professional productivity. A balanced mind leads to improved engagement at work, boosts productivity and creativity, and also helps foster a supportive work environment.
This activity is great AND not limited to remote companies. This is a low-effort challenge to set up for non-remote corporations seeking to introduce mental health parlance into their company culture.
We hope we invigorated you to leverage social shame to your advantage and start your own accountability challenge today! 💪
