How do I hold myself accountable to a six month practice plan? Start by being honest about whether you can hold yourself accountable at all. Most people can't, and there is no shame in that. The trick is deadlines, and not all deadlines are equal. A soft deadline is when you write the next milestone on your calendar and treat its arrival as the cutoff for finishing the last batch of work. Nobody is going to walk into your office and demand to see results, so a soft deadline only works if you genuinely respect your own calendar. A hard deadline [...]