Commitment

I've been thinking a bit about goalpost optimisation in the wake of my most recent writing failure. It's tricky to avoid optimising your goals if those goals only exist in your own head, or don't seem real. The antidote is to commit to those goals in a way that prevents you from easily changing them later.

The most common way to do this is having some kind of commitment partner. In more traditional work that often takes the form of a manager or boss who sets your goals. For people in more creative arrangements it's usually other people in a similar situation: a mentor, or a group you can commit in front of. I've tried those methods and, while they work, there's something inherently unstable about needing a particular person or group to set your goals properly. What if the person gets busy, or you don't see the group for a while?

Writing goals down seems to get a little bit of the way there, but I don't think it goes far enough. I'd like to suggest a better answer: public commitments. Unlike a particular person or group, the idea of public isn't particularly vulnerable to change. Public commitments are something akin to performance. In a sense, you're performing your goals in public rather than practising them in private. I think this method could be a significant improvement over commitment partners; although people are still better for discussing goals, a public commitment is a stronger and more reliable way to set them.

What I would really like is a platform for making public commitments. Obviously I could write about them here, but I'd rather keep this space for more interesting things. You could presumably use social networks or other things to make public commitments, but they aren't really designed for it. A public commitment platform would give you a particular page that would list your current commitments, as well as integrate with social networks and provide widgets you could embed to show your commitments in whatever public place you feel is useful.

So I'd like to publicly commit to making that platform. Not all of it all at once, of course, but something that at least has the bare functionality of collecting and showcasing what you've committed to. It'd be wonderful to commit to making a public commitment platform using that public commitment platform, but that obviously runs into certain difficulties. Instead, I'll commit to it here.

Next Monday's post will be a commitment platform.