Two pieces of standard advice, and they contradict each other.
Tell people, because accountability works and you'll be less likely to let it slide. Don't tell people, because announcing an intention gives you some of the satisfaction of achieving it and reduces the drive to follow through.
Both are supported by research, and the reason they can both be true is that they're describing different acts.
What the research roughly shows
Carefully, because this area is easy to overstate.
There's a well-known line of work suggesting that announcing an identity-related goal to people whose opinion you care about can reduce follow-through — the theory being that the recognition you get for stating the intention partly substitutes for the recognition you'd get for doing it. It's a real finding and it's been replicated, though the effect is narrower than the popular version implies.
There's also a substantial body of work on commitment and accountability pointing the other way: people who report to someone, or who make a public commitment with a consequence attached, do better than those who don't.
The reconciliation is straightforward once stated. Announcing an intention and being accountable to somebody are not the same act. One is a statement about who you are. The other is an arrangement about what you'll deliver.
Announcing is telling people what you intend to become. I'm going to write a book. I'm training for a marathon. It's an identity claim, it gets a positive response, and the response arrives immediately at no cost.
Accountability is telling one person what you'll have done by a date. I'll send you the first chapter on the 14th. Nobody congratulates you for that. It creates an obligation with a specific shape, and the recognition only arrives if you deliver.
The first tends to substitute. The second tends to work. And they feel similar from the inside, which is why the advice gets confused.
The difference shows up in the response you get. An announcement is met with encouragement, which is pleasant and free. An arrangement is met with a nod and a date in someone's calendar, which is not pleasant at all and is the entire mechanism.
What to do instead of announcing
Three things, all narrower than a general announcement.
Tell one person, with a deliverable and a date. Not I'm writing a book but I'll send you three thousand words on the 14th. One person, a specific artefact, a specific day. That single arrangement restores most of what a job supplies and costs one message.
Tell people what you've done rather than what you're going to do. Retrospective sharing carries no substitution risk, because the thing already happened. It also produces much better conversations.
Say less about the goals that matter most. The identity substitution effect is strongest where the goal is most tied to who you want to be, which means the goal you're most tempted to announce is the one where announcing costs most.
Where telling people helps unambiguously
The counter, because the anti-announcement position gets overstated too.
If the goal needs other people's cooperation, they need to know. A partner who's covering two evenings a week has to be told, and the conversation is the arrangement rather than an announcement.
If you'd benefit from expertise or introductions, saying what you're doing is how those arrive. Plenty of things have happened for people because they mentioned a project at the right moment.
And some people are straightforwardly motivated by having said it out loud, and know this about themselves. If you've finished things after announcing them and abandoned things you kept private, believe your own evidence over any study.
The version that quietly does harm
Worth naming, because it's common and doesn't look like a problem.
Repeated announcing. Mentioning the same intention to different people over months — at dinners, in conversations, whenever it comes up — produces a steady low-level supply of recognition for something that hasn't moved since March.
The tell is that you enjoy talking about it more than working on it. That's not a character failing; it's a rational response to one activity being pleasant and the other being difficult. But it's worth noticing, because it can sustain a dead goal for years.
Two conversations
The book. He mentions it at three dinners over eighteen months. Each time it's received well — people are interested, ask what it's about, say they'd read it. Each time he comes away feeling good about the book. In eighteen months the manuscript grows by about four thousand words.
Then a different arrangement. He tells one friend, a former colleague who reads carefully, that he'll send her chapter one on the 14th of the month. There's no enthusiasm in that conversation and nothing to enjoy about it.
The chapter goes on the 13th, because a date with a person attached behaves nothing like an intention mentioned at dinner.
She sends back four paragraphs, two of which are uncomfortable. That's also the arrangement working, and it's the thing eighteen months of pleasant conversations never once produced.
What it means for a list
A goal on a list is a private commitment, and private commitments have no consequence attached — nothing happens if it goes quiet, and nothing external ever asks.
The gap number is a weak substitute for someone waiting, and it's better than nothing: a goal at 61 days sitting at the top of a list is the closest thing to being asked about it that exists when nobody is.
But it is a substitute, and a modest one. If a goal genuinely matters, one person with a date attached will do more than any measurement, and the two together are better than either.
Which is worth being honest about rather than pretending a number replaces a person. It doesn't. It notices things a person wouldn't and it never once asks how it's going.
Related: Founders and the goal nobody's chasing you about · Creative practice without an audience · Side projects that die at 80% done
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