1 Week 1 Project: A Study in Accountability

How many of you have vowed to write a blog post once a week only to have an inactive blog staring back at you six months down the road? I will raise my hand as one of the blogging idealists that has a hard time turning ideas into a written reality. Now how many of you have had a weekly project turn into a monthly project and then into yet another dead project? I will raise my hand here as well, and if you did the same, right now you’re probably wondering the same thing as me — sheesh, what the heck do I do with my time??

Enter Mike, a Name.com customer and good buddy of mine, and his site 1 Week 1 Project. The idea is simple: he works on one project per week and he blogs about it (resulting in at least one blog post per week). As the site says, it’s a study in motivation, accountability, and self-imposed limits. It’s an idea I’ve loved from the start and some of the projects Mike has taken on are equally as clever.

One of those projects was Teach Me Your Trade and I’ll Teach You Mine. A brilliant idea really, the concept was to meet with someone for an hour and learn from them on whatever topic they wanted to teach; then you switch and you get to teach that person for an hour. Having not seen my friend for over a year, I was excited to get together for a couple hours and drop some knowledge. In our session I shared my thoughts and experience on managing a community, and in return I received some much needed CSS guidance. It was a great exercise and to be honest, the mutual learning/teaching thing is kind of exhilarating. It’s something I think we both wanted to try and continue beyond this one weekly project.

Motivation and accountability is something that I’d be willing to bet most people struggle with, so it’s been really fun to see the projects Mike comes up with and then to return the next week to read whether or not he was successful.

Have you found your own solution to the motivation/accountability gap? Let us know in the comments!

If you’re a Name.com customer and you’re doing cool things on the interwebs, shoot us an email! We’d love to see them.