347 Personal Effectiveness Articles to Help You Change Your Game

I did some cleanup on Sources of Insight to re-focus on personal effectiveness.   You can use that link to easily browse 347 personal effectiveness articles (and growing.)   Personal effectiveness is your key to making the most of what you’ve got.

I think of personal effectiveness as the ability to produce a decided, decisive, or desired effect through your abilities, energy, skills, talent, and time.   Personal effectiveness in action is really the ability to be effective in any situation by knowing how to play your cards well.  This includes knowing yourself, and reading the situation, so you can play your cards more effectively.

While you might pursuit to be the best in the world, the reality is, in many cases, your best move is simply to be effective.   If you do happen to be the best in the world at something, the other key is to avoid being ineffective in all the other areas of your life.  This is especially true if you want to be better balanced across all aspects of skilled living.  And, by balancing across the key areas of your life, you can set yourself up to more effectively pursuit being the best at something.   That is, *if* you make the space for it, and hone your personal effectiveness.

Your personal effectiveness is really the synthesis of your abilities, energy, skills, talent, and time.

The synthesis is key, and that’s why frameworks or systems or routines or habits help.  In fact, a big reason behind why I wrote Getting Results the Agile Way was to create a simple system for personal effectiveness.  I wanted to combine the best of what we’ve learned from productivity, leadership, personal development, motivation, time management, and more, into a system that’s personal, and that helps you bring out your best.  It’s also a continuous learning system, so you get better over time, by learning and adapting, with the system on your side.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that skill makes a big difference.   So does mindset.  When you combine a learning mindset, with a focus on gaining skills and experience, and using an effective feedback loop, you create rapid results.  When you really pay attention to feedback, you can stay the course, or change your approach.   It’s your willingness to change that often makes the difference.

Here is a sample of some of the articles from the personal effectiveness set, that you might enjoy:

1. Find Your Purpose
2. Find Your Strengths
3. Find Your Values
4. Change Patterns: A Language for Introducing New Ideas
5. How To Scale Yourself as a One-Man Band
6. 5 Things that Determine What Things Mean and What You’re Going to Do
7. For the Love of Project Management
8. Work-Life Balance is Hot
9. Living Your Process
10. Work Hard
11. How To Create the Ultimate Relationship
12. 101 Hacks for a Better Year