The key to achieving your goals: accountability

Adriaan Kolff
3 min readJan 20, 2022

The key to achieving your goals: accountability

Each year between Christmas and New Year I write down my goals. The hardest thing about goals and what you want to achieve is that they often involve lifestyle changes. It’s hard to stay disciplined. It’s hard to stay focused. That’s why only 7% of new years resolutions actually stick…

The biggest hack to do so? Have a friend, colleague, spouse or your mom hold you accountable for your own resolutions. Be brave and share your goals with the world.

Research by American Society of Training and Development has shown that accountability is the most important factor in habit formation or habit changing.

If you are held accountable to someone else, by committing to someone that you will achieve a goal, then your chance of success is up to 95 percent.

My coach? My good friend and fellow entrepreneur: Merick Schoute.

So how do we do this?

  • We hold each other accountable for our own goals
  • At the beginning of the year we share our goals for the year.
  • We break these goals down per quarter, month and per week
  • Every week at a fixed moment we update each other on our progress, hold each other accountable for our past week and plan the week ahead with fixed blocks in our agenda

This has been the biggest productivity hack to reach my goals and not get side tracked.

Your first goal of this year should be to find the person that is going to hold you accountable and who you will hold accountable.

Can’t find anyone? Check out Commit Action who provide accountability coaches to keep you on track for the year.

Below my goals for 2022.

🌱 MatcHR:

  • Double MatcHR’s revenue
  • Grow to 60+ employees by 2022
  • Successfully open our Capetown office (more on that later)
  • Successfully rebrand MatcHR

💸 Finance

  • Earn a passive income to cover my fixed costs in NY
Adriaan Kolff

Co-founder of MatcHR, investor, entrepreneur. I write about entrepreneurship, recruitment & productivity. Follow me here or on LinkedIn.