We talked a lot about peer pressure as a lever that managers can use to control their employees, but it’s also important to think about how peer pressure can be used in a more empowering context, where people voluntarily submit to peer evaluation to help themselves accomplish a desired goal when many demands are competing for their time.

I can give an example from personal experience. It wasn’t done within a work context, but the basic mechanism applies.

I worked as a newspaper journalist in New York for several years before coming to the I School, and the old cliche about every reporter having an unfinished novel stashed in his or her desk drawer is more or less true. It’s an information-intensive (and especially a writing-intensive) job and it’s hard to find the time and headspace for a personal project on the side. So over the years, a group of us all knew we had this mutual interest and eventually we decided to act on it by staring a writing group where we would all get together and share some personal writing once a month.

Getting feedback was definitely a benefit of this group, but the real value — one we explicitly talked about and sought out — was that the combination of peer encouragement and peer pressure (the fear of disappointing our respected peers by failing to produce) gave us the extra motivation to make room in our lives for something that we cared about but that could be difficult to prioritize when it conferred little tangible benefit (unlike working, cleaning your apartment, running errands, etc.).

If we can generalize a little bit from this case example, I think this can be an effective structure for keeping longer-term projects on track when you have good buy-in from your team but a lot of competing demands on your time.