We’ve all set goals with friends before, and quickly forgotten them once those friends are out of sight and out of mind. But what if your friends could virtually hold you accountable without actually having to wag a finger in your face? Three of my closest friends and I set a goal of working out three times each week for at least 30 minutes at a time. And we decided to hold each other accountable by starting a shared photo album. After every workout, you post a pic of yourself with a caption of what you did.

The honor system wraps the entire experience, since sometimes you forget to snap a sweaty picture and have to post something after the fact, and of course, nobody is verifying the length of your workout. If you don’t meet the goal, you put $25 into a slush fund, and we settle up quarterly and distribute the money across everyone who participated. We started the album in January of 2022, and continue it to this day.

Except. We never actually collected or distributed any money. People got sick or busy and missed days here and there, but they got back on track every time. The album worked even without any enforcement mechanisms. It added a layer of expectation and accountability, and made something that feels like a sometimes oppressive goal that only falls on each of us individually into something about friendship and community.

Even though we only work out together, in person, maybe 10 percent of the time, it feels like a collective victory when any of us has a great streak or makes progress. It feels like we’re in it together.

And there’s science to this! Katy Milkman, a behavioral science Ph.D and professor at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School writes about this in her book, How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You are to Where You Want to Be. She has an entire chapter on social accountability and penalties in the book (which is great and worth a read if you have the time!) but she summed it up nicely on this episode of the American Psychology Association podcast Speaking of Psychology: “accountability absolutely matters because when we increase the price of our or vice—like not studying or not saving for retirement or not eating a healthy diet or not getting your report to your boss in time—if there's a bigger cost, then your general tendency to procrastinate and to prioritize what's fun in the moment instead of what's good for you in the long run, well the bigger the cost, the less that is likely to happen. So you can up the cost of bad behavior and see less of it.”