Personal Project Analysis
Audit every project in your life and cut the ones that are not making it better
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 80%
Personal Project Analysis, from personality psychologist Brian Little, treats your life as a portfolio of 'personal projects' that range from the large (running a business) to the trivial (being on a diet). Because the roles and situations you occupy constantly feed back and shape your personality traits, the projects you keep are quietly deciding who you become. The method asks you to sit down, list every project, and run each through three checks: am I making progress on this, is it making me happy, and what effect is it having on me? Then you get deliberately brutal, dropping or pivoting away from projects that are not making your life better so you can redirect that energy. It turns passive drift into a conscious choice about which forces get to shape you.
Origin
Attributed by Christian Jarrett to personality psychologist Brian Little, who developed personal project analysis as a way to reflect on and reprioritise the projects that occupy a life.
Core principles
- 01Everything you pursue, big or small, is a 'personal project' shaping who you become
- 02The situations and roles you stay in constantly feed back and shape your traits
- 03Progress, happiness, and effect on you are the tests each project must pass
- 04Being brutal about dropping dead projects frees energy for better ones
- 05Awareness of these influences lets you steer your own change deliberately
How to run it
- 1
List every personal project
Write down all the projects you are currently invested in, from the biggest ventures to small pursuits like a diet or a hobby.
Pro tip Include trivial-seeming projects; small commitments still consume attention and shape you.
- 2
Check progress on each
For every project ask honestly whether you are actually making progress or just holding it open.
- 3
Check how each makes you feel
Ask whether the project makes you feel happy and what effect it is having on you overall.
- 4
Be brutal and prune
Identify projects that are not making your life any better and decide to drop them, pivot, or try something else instead.
Pro tip Reclaimed energy from a dead project is the whole payoff; redirect it deliberately.
Watch out Do not confuse a project in a temporary dip with a genuinely dead one; look at the trend, not one bad week.
In the wild
Chris Williamson had poured obsessive, conscientious drive into running club nights, but the reward was diminishing and there was little leverage in the model. Effectively running the analysis on that project, he recognised it was no longer moving his life forward, pivoted, and later rediscovered the same drive in a higher-leverage project, the podcast, where the positive feedback re-ignited his conscientiousness.
→ A pivot away from a low-leverage, waning project into one that reignited motivation and scaled.
Common mistakes
Auditing only the big projects
Small and trivial projects still shape you and drain energy; leaving them off the list hides real drag on your life.
Refusing to cut anything
The value comes from being brutal; if you keep every project 'just in case', you never free the energy the audit is meant to release.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone feeling stretched, stagnant, or unsure whether their current pursuits still serve them.
Not ideal for
People in acute crisis who need immediate support rather than a reflective inventory.
From the transcript
“It's from the personality psychologist Brian Little and he calls it personal project analysis... reflect on all the various personal projects you have.”
“Being a little bit brutal and looking through and saying should I drop some of these personal projects cuz they're not making my life any…”
From the episode
The Science Of Personality Change - Dr Christian Jarrett - #523
Dr Christian Jarrett