What worked for me (and I'm assuming the original question refers to a personal project) is to start working with someone else wanting to achieve a similar goal.

Meet once a week. Analyze what you've accomplished over the last week. Outline what you're going to do over the next week.

Don't spend the meeting doing too much project design/planning--delegate that to be done over the week, then discuss it via email or during the meeting.

The accountability helps, but what really helps is having someone else who actually cares about the project enough to provide feedback, interest, and support.

This memo just makes him sound like one of those office horror stories. You know the kind: doesn't take interest in things, but flips out over randomly when they do take interest and then starts making knee-jerk decisions/vetoes. The kind that makes their employees keep information from them because they don't know which minor detail is going to get them chewed out today.

Not that he doesn't have a valid point, but there might be technical/security/business reasons or time and resource limitations that caused this problem. Yeah, Windows Update is scary, but it's probably designed to convince people to keep their computers up-to-date in the interest of security. WMM download and installation is difficult, but maybe that's because it's been treated like an afterthought and not given the priority it deserves. Who knows.

Point is, you need to identify *why* things went wrong and correct them from there. This is the type of email that would scare a subordinate into coming up with a kludgy or short-sighted fix because he doesn't want to incur any further wrath.

Or maybe I'm just getting burnt out and bitter.