Introducing CommitPool
A new way to hold yourself accountable and achieve your personal goals
Humans are bad at achieving the goals we set out for ourselves. Achieving our personal goals involves putting in a lot of work before we start to see real results, and we are masters at delaying that work.
We procrastinate when we lack accountability. Accountability works by imposing a cost on failure to follow through. If we face a meaningful penalty for not doing what we say, we’re a lot more likely to actually do it — even when it’s hard.
In fact, a lot of modern society today relies on accountability measures to hold people to the promises and agreements they’ve made. Governments and legal systems impose concrete penalties — ranging from fines all the way to imprisonment — on people not for doing what they agreed to, and the threat of those penalties is a strong motivator to follow through. More informally, norms and other forms of social reputation keep us in check, too.
These accountability measures are powerful enough to run society, so surely they can work for mere personal goals! Unfortunately, there’s a catch: external accountability measures like monetary penalties and reputation require external actors to implement them. If you break an agreement with a business partner, it’s the business partner and their network who will lower your reputation, and it’s the legal system that will force you to pay money back the money.
But if you break a promise to yourself, who can penalize you? By and large, whether you achieve your personal goals doesn’t impact anybody but you, so there’s no external actor who is naturally motivated to enforce a penalty.
So what accountability measures do we have in our self-accountability tool bag? What costs can we impose on ourselves should we fail to follow through? For the most part, we are limited to internal psychology: our honor, our sense of self-worth, and or ego. In some cases the desire to avoid those psychological costs keeps us in line. In many cases, however, it’s not enough to overcome our Instant Gratification Monkey.
Humanity’s most powerful accountability mechanisms don’t work well for holding ourselves accountable
When it comes to doing the work to achieve our personal goals, we are on our own. Or are we? Might there be a way to enlist somebody’s help to enforce stronger accountability measures on us?
The answer is Yes, but there’s a caveat.
A flawed market for personal commitment services
To get somebody else to help us with our personal goals — which do not impact them — we need to give them a reason to do so. That reason is usually money.
That money creates a market, and a handful of companies have sprung up offering paid personal commitment services. To one degree or another, however, the success of these services thus far has been stymied by the unintended consequences of those payments and centralized control.
Paying a third-party personal commitment service impacts its ability to be impartial
The services these companies offer typically work like this: customers establish and “commit” to a quantifiable goal (e.g., taking 5,000 steps in a week), identify a data source for their progress (e.g., Fitbit), and authorize the company to charge their credit card (e.g., for $10) if they fail to meet that short term goal. The money collected as penalties then goes to cover the company’s operational expenses.
The idea is theoretically sound. After all, a monetary penalty can be an effective accountability measure — if certain conditions are met. These conditions, however, are rather specific: there must be a strong reason for the customer to believe that they will be penalized if and only if they don’t meet their commitment. If the customer is worried they might be penalized even if they meet their commitment (as an enemy might do), or if they think they might not be penalized when they don’t meet their commitment (as a friend might do), then the accountability and motivation disappear.
In other words, as a customer, you have to trust the company to be neither too lenient nor too strict; to neither let you get away with being lazy nor to cheat and steal your money. And when the company unilaterally controls both determining whether you met your commitment and the money you staked on your commitment, that balance is extremely difficult to find.
One company has addressed this problem of trust by giving their customers final say in whether they get penalized. Before charging their credit card, they allow the customer to decide if the failure to meet their commitment was legitimate; if not, the company waives the penalty with no questions asked. That certainly wins customers’ trust, but customers effectively enforcing their own penalty creates the very conditions a third party commitment service is meant to avoid in the first place.
On the flip side, lest you think customers need not be worried about a company cheating them, consider the case of the now-defunct Pact. Pact settled for nearly $1 million after the FTC found they were falsely marking customer commitments as failed and not paying out success rewards as promised.
Holding ourselves accountable
What, then, are people seeking help with their personal goals to do? Do they sign up for a commitment service from a company that won’t steal from them, even if the service can’t truly hold them accountable? Or do they roll the dice on a service with both the incentive and the means to steal from them?
At CommitPool, we believe there’s a better way. We believe that it’s possible for a commitment service to hold its users fully accountable to their commitments without being able to steal their money. In fact, we believe that it’s possible to build a mechanism for people to truly hold themselves accountable.
That’s exactly what we’re building.
How? By replacing points of centralized control with web3 technologies and decentralized protocols, CommitPool makes it virtually impossible for users to either cheat themselves or to get cheated. For example, we replace a company charging credit cards with Ethereum smart contracts that execute logic that cannot be manipulated. and we use a decentralized oracle protocol to feed users’ activity data into the smart contracts such that neither the user nor anybody else can manipulate the data.
The initial version of CommitPool will introduce our credible commitment framework. Users (“committers”) can commit to walking, running, and biking a certain distance during a week, staking DAI (a digital US dollar) that they will lose if they don’t hit their distance goal.
In future versions, we’ll build on that basic structure to strengthen the motivational power of CommitPool commitments. In addition to a penalty for failing to fulfill your commitment, we’re working on a number of ways to reward you for succeeding. And beyond monetary incentives, we’re working on ways to incorporate additional accountability measures — such as social and reputational measures — to keep committers on track.
CommitPool puts you back in control of your personal goals and gives you new tools to help you hold yourself accountable
We’re starting small, but we’re committed to big things. We can’t wait to show you.
