Somewhere on your phone or laptop, there's a productivity app that you used for exactly one day seven months ago.

Remember? You spent hours filling it up with an extensive to-do list – shirking the stuff you actually had to do in the process – and felt like you finally, mercifully had all of your colour-coded shit together.

And then you never opened it again.

Well according to a post on Lifehacker, next time you should forgo the program and scribble your to-do list on the office whiteboard, instead.

It's all part of the belief that by making your workload a public spectacle, you'll feel more accountable to complete it. 

One 2015 study found that people are more likely to accomplish their goals if they kept their co-workers updated on how they were faring. And a review published earlier this year in Psychological Bulletin analysed 138 different studies found that people completed more of what they set out to do when others could track their progress.

And it's not just the threat of ridicule that makes it an effective method. Computer scientist Joe Reddington decided to share his task list online, and found that he was forced to look at it with a more critical perspective.

"When it was a list for me, it looked great," he wrote. But "when I decided to make it public, it instantly looked very poor [...] Tasks that had gradually changed meaning in my head."

So next time you have stuff to do, make it everyone else's business too. If you're brave enough.