3. Be held publicly accountable by writing about your goals on your blog or having your friend hold you to them. Interestingly this doesn't always work as you

3. Be held publicly accountable by writing about your goals on your blog or having your friend hold you to them. Interestingly this doesn't always work as you expect. I've been poking at this a bit recently since a side-project touches on intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in its users. Basically for some kinds of goal stating it publicly actually make it less likely that you complete the goal (the theory being roughly that just stating it publicly feels like making progress, so you're less likely to actually make progress.) See http://sivers.org/zipit http://sivers.org/zipit for some background info. There's been more research but I don't have the references to hand ATM and am too lazy to Google for it right now :-)