Run a Commitment Audit

Building — Month 8

Professionalism & Work Habits • Reliability — Practical Exercise

Run a Commitment Audit

Professionalism & Work Habits — Reliability · ~5 min exercise

This week’s deep dive named the mechanism: trust is built through small, kept promises, and eroded through overcommitment and silence. This exercise takes that idea out of theory and applies it to your actual, current commitments — the ones sitting on your plate right now, some of which you may already sense are at risk.

The Exercise

1. List every open commitment you’re currently holding. Work and personal both count. Anything you’ve told another person you’ll do, by when — even informally, even a small one.
2. For each one, mark it green, yellow, or red. Green: on track, no concerns. Yellow: at risk, but recoverable if you act now. Red: you already know, deep down, it’s going to slip or you can’t realistically do it as promised.
3. For every yellow or red item, decide the honest move. Yellow usually means: adjust your plan now, before it becomes a problem. Red usually means: it’s time for a proactive conversation — renegotiating the timeline, asking for help, or saying no to something else to protect it.
4. Draft one proactive message today. Pick your single riskiest commitment and write the “heads up” message now — even if you don’t send it immediately. Getting it out of your head and onto the page makes it far easier to actually send.
5. Notice your yes-pattern. Look at how many of these commitments you took on without checking your existing plate first. That’s the pattern to interrupt going forward, not this week’s list specifically.

The goal isn’t to feel bad about a yellow or red item — everyone accumulates a few. The goal is catching them while there’s still time to act, instead of finding out the hard way that someone was counting on something you’d quietly stopped tracking.