Token Accountability

I remember meeting a friend after he had already scaled his business significantly. By the time I met him, he had taken an education and tutoring business from a single location to more than 50 franchise and corporate locations. I flew him down to speak to a group of entrepreneurs, and I remember asking him what had helped him grow so quickly.

He told me he got up every day at 5:30 a.m. and spent 90 minutes working on whatever was his most important priority. No busywork like email, only the hard stuff that would actually move the business forward. He invited me to join for a few mornings, which I eagerly accepted, but mostly because I was two time zones ahead, so for me it was a leisurely 7:30 a.m. start to the day.

The format was basically this: everyone would hop on a video call, share what they were working on, and then it was cameras on, mics off for the next 90 minutes. I was completely blown away by how productive I was, and by the power of those virtual eyeballs staring back at me. Even if everyone was really just looking at their own screens. It had been decades since I’d had a boss, so this was about as close as I came to someone virtually looking over my shoulder.

I shared the idea with some other friends and we agreed to try it out together at our real 5:30 a.m. start time. In the short term, everyone found the routine very powerful. I thought I had found an accountability hack to make us more productive. But over the long term, the experiment taught me a few lessons I hadn’t expected.

First, I would be lying if I didn’t admit how incredibly draining it was to sustain that amount of intensity and focus. Over time, I found myself sort of…I guess doing a bit of performance theater rather than actually doing the hard work. I’d start making up stuff that sounded important, or drift back to checking email, because I was exhausted from trying to maintain that level of intensity and focus Monday through Thursday.

Second, it was surprisingly hard to find other “rock star” entrepreneurs who wanted to participate in the ritual. I think the ones with the killer track records and discipline viewed it as a drag on their own schedule and cadence. It kind of felt like we were introducing a routine that intruded on a system that already worked.

On the other hand, we never had a problem finding a revolving door of people who said they wanted accountability only to show up for a day or two before quietly disappearing. This is a lot of guessing on my part, but it often seemed as if people who wanted “accountability” were really looking for a silver bullet and discovered yet again that there was no silver bullet that could conjure discipline and willpower. Either it was there or it wasn’t. An accountability hack wasn’t going to suddenly solve the underlying problem.

The people who wanted accountability were most often the people an accountability gimmick couldn’t help. The people who succeeded didn’t need it, and the people who wanted it never seemed to find it, even with an accountability group. I also learned, for better or worse, that these formats had a tendency to devolve into a cycle of judgment and shaming rather than support. It was like an instrument that always drifted out of tune.

Externalized motivation? Sure, that does work. But externally hacking a way to jump-start internal discipline? If it exists, this wasn’t it, and I have yet to find a way that works.

Given that backdrop, I was surprised to discover that one of the few things that has actually motivated me, even held me somewhat accountable to big deadlines, has been the freakin’ usage meters from Claude and OpenAI. Mostly Claude, because I’m convinced the whole “you’re running out of GAS, upgrade immediately” warning, even with 25% still remaining, is psychologically designed to goad you on…and I confess it works.

I understand the psychological phenomenon has something to do with loss aversion or waste aversion. Like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet and, even after being completely full, feeling compelled to eat one more lobster tail because leaving it there feels like waste. The waste becomes visible and ever-present. Even knowing exactly what’s happening, I’m amazed that the little usage meter still drags me across the finish line and pulls just a bit more effort out of me.

My sidekick AI writer says not to use the lobster analogy. But that’s how I really feel about it. A more aspirational framework might be a pacer like the running partner an ultramarathoner uses to help stay on time.

Either way, to me, there has never been a clearer metric of unused capacity. Literally. And by way of capacity, a numerical representation of wasted potential. Did I live up to my potential this week? No. I threw away 50% of it by letting it expire.

It represented, in the most annoying way possible, how a manager (me) failed to delegate to an army of superintelligent direct reports. And it represented how the leader (still me) failed to have a clear enough vision of what even needed to be delegated.

Unused tokens symbolized either unused delegation or a vision so small there was nothing left to delegate.

It reminds me of what Walter Isaacson dubbed the ultimate Elon Musk put-down: “What did you get done this week?” And that little bar is basically there mocking me: if I left it unused, I didn’t get enough done.