Accounting for failure
You are going to break commitments with yourself. This is what to do about it.
Start with what I am not doing. I do not run co-working calls, and I do not do accountability partners in the usual sense, for two reasons.
The first is dependency. Once the work happens on the co-working call, it only happens on the co-working call. "I'll do it later, in the session." You have outsourced the starting of your own work to a calendar invite, and when the invite goes away, so does the work.
The second is that accountability, as people usually run it, is box-checking wearing a nicer shirt. You do the thing so your partner won't judge you. That is doing it to avoid a small social consequence, which is not the same as doing it because you want to change, and it quietly trains you to care about the report rather than the work. You are your own best accountability partner. The question is what you do when you fail yourself, because you will.
The dollar and the bows
A friend gave me How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the front there are nine suggestions for getting the most out of the book, and number seven is this: offer your spouse, your child, or a business associate a dollar every time they catch you violating a principle. Make a game of it.
In principle I like it. A dollar is small, and yet if you are handing out twenty dollars a day because you broke the rule twenty times, you stop and notice that you are not actually applying any of this. It makes the gap visible. My hesitation is that it is money, and money is the thing we are already too willing to make the answer to everything. It can turn a practice into a transaction, and then you are buying your way out of noticing.
What I do instead: when I break a commitment with myself, I add bows in the morning. Not as punishment. Because the consequence has to be something I live through, in my body, at a time when I would rather not. Thirty extra bows when I am already tired is a very good place to ask whether yelling at someone yesterday was worth it. The answer arrives on its own.
There is a trap here and almost everyone falls into it. People pick "challenging things" as their consequence, and the challenging thing they pick is something they already enjoy. An extra workout. A long walk. More reading. That is not a consequence, that is entertainment with a serious label on it. If the consequence is something you would happily do on a good day, it is not doing the job.
Your consequence: what will you do, in your body, when you break a commitment with yourself? Check it against the trap: would you happily do this on a good day? If yes, pick something else.
The two useless responses
When we fail we tend to go one of two directions. The first is "I messed up, whatever." No accountability, no look, move along. The second is the spiral: how could I have done that, you idiot, this is exactly why nothing works, I hate myself. It looks like accountability because it hurts, but it is the same avoidance in a different costume; the pain replaces the looking.
The third way is to ask what actually happened. Why did I fail here? What illusion did I fall into? What was the thought, or the feeling, in the second before I did it? And then, instead of only thinking about it, take the consequence, so you spend time with the person you were when you broke your word. That is the whole point of a consequence you live through: it gives you time to slow down and meet that version of yourself, rather than filing a report about them.
Each time: what I committed to, what I did instead, the thought or feeling right before it, and the consequence I took.
Saying it out loud
Self-repentance is one thing. Saying it to another person is another, and you need both. Tell your buddy: yesterday I broke a commitment, here is what happened, here is what I did about it. Not to bury it deeper; to let it out and be done with it.
There are two popular ways to share a failure, and both fail. One is the shame performance: I am so terrible, I said I wouldn't, I always do this. The other is the shrug: doesn't everybody do that, I had a hard week. Neither leaves you anywhere. What I want instead is observation. This happened. I took accountability for it. Here it is, out of my chest and in the room.
If you are the one listening
This part matters more than the telling, and it is the part people get wrong, so I will be blunt about it.
Do not add on. When your buddy hands you their failure, you do not say "oh that's wonderful that you noticed," you do not say "good job," and you do not say "you know what helps with that?" You do not reassure them that it wasn't really wrong. Every one of those, however kind the intention, has a very high chance of turning into a shaming situation, because now their failure is a thing being evaluated by someone else.
Be a compassionate witness. Hold them in your space, see them as they are, and witness it on their behalf. That is the entire job. If they ask you a question ("I am having a harder time with this than I expected, do you have any advice?"), then you can talk. Asked, not offered.
Write the sentence you will say when your buddy shares a failure with you. Then write the sentence you are tempted to say instead, the helpful one. Notice the difference.
When you find out you do not want it
This one comes up constantly. You commit to a practice, you start, and somewhere in the middle you discover it is not for you. Not too hard, not failing; you genuinely do not want it. You always thought you wanted a podcast, and four episodes in you realize a podcast is just you talking about whatever you want, which you can do without a podcast, and the whole idea was more appealing than the thing.
Here is the rule, and it depends on what kind of commitment it was.
A timed practice has an end date: fifteen minutes of meditation, a hundred days, a thousand days, a competition on the calendar. A goal practice has a finish line instead of a date: 108 bows, a language certificate, whatever it takes. For both of those, see it through to the end even if you have discovered you do not want it. Knowing certainly what you dislike is worth as much as knowing certainly what you like, and you only get that from the far end. I know people who finished a thousand-day practice saying they hated every day of it; they are not worse off, they are certain. And the incidental gains do not evaporate: if I get to C1 in French and never move to France, I still speak French.
Everything else, the open-ended intentions (more fiber, more walks), you can drop whenever you like. If the walks around your neighborhood turn out to be miserable, stop walking. It was never a commitment, it was a preference.
So the question to ask before you start anything is which of the three it is. That is the difference between quitting and finishing something that taught you a "no."
The practice you are in right now: is it timed (an end date), goal-based (a finish line), or neither? Write which, and what the end actually is.
Next: Decide the time, the other half of this. Then the methods.