How I'm prioritising my personal projects for 2025

Impact & Effort Matrix, an idea from Slow Productivity, and using ChatGPT as a coach

Coming into the year I was aware of one big thing: I have too many things I want to do, and not enough time to do them all.

I'm sure you can relate to this to some degree but it's even more acute for me this year especially with my wife returning to university.

So yeah, I can't do it all. And when I have tried to "do it all" at best, I've made little to no progress; at worst, I've become stressed and a bad person to be around (and still made little progress).

So I took some time at the start of January to get out of the rat race of online content so I could act with more intention.

Here's what I did and how it might help you.

Identified what really mattered

It doesn’t matter how fast you are going, if you’re going in the wrong direction. — Stephen Covey

Imagine reaching the top of the corporate ladder in a job you hate for a company with values that go against your own.

Sounds impossible?

Well, what about wanting to be a great father but realising you never have any time for your kids because you work all the time? Or taking a job because it’s flexible and lets you do your hobby a lot, but then you get a promotion and have no time for your hobby.

I didn’t want to make this mistake this year, so I took some time to think about my core values, what I truly wanted, and what would make this year a success or failure.

These would be my filters to pick the right opportunities to invest in.

And I used a “friend” to help.

Used ChatGPT as a coach

The best coaches ask questions to help you figure out the answers, rather than giving instructions.

LLMs are great for this function; with the right prompt.

I used ChatGPT to ask me questions one at a time about what things I was considering, why they mattered to me, what successes and ideas I had for them, etc. After a while, it summed up and rephrased what I had said and asked me to confirm.

Sometimes I corrected or added a few points, but generally, it got a lot right (like a normal human coach).

After reviewing several ideas and areas of my life, it summed up and made a suggestion and… I agreed! It matched my values and made sense based on my interests and results from the last year.

But I still asked it for what it would suggest if I followed a more (probably) lucrative option. Seeing the alternative path actually helped me see that the first suggestion was a better match for my goals.

Now I had to prioritise the specifics. And for that, I used a classic system.

Set up a personal project grid

One of the easiest ways to prioritise your actions is a matrix with two axes: impact and effort.

Pick a project like updating a website or making a sketchnote summary of a book you just read. Then give it a score from 1 - 3 for the effort it will take to do and another from 1 - 3 for the likely impact it will have. This gives you a great key for what to focus on.

• Quick wins: Items that are 3 for impact but 1 for effort are the things you should do first. They’ll bring the greatest results.

• Major projects: these are the 3-impact but 3-effort actions. They take more time but will be worth the reward.

• Fill-ins: low-effort low-impact tasks, perfect for when you don’t have time (or mental space) to work on something big, but should be limited.

• And finally the Thankless tasks. The 1-impact, 3-effort tasks that are easy to fall into the trap of wasting time on doing. It’s rarely intentional, and we will always spend time on some projects that don’t bring the results we expect, but by taking this into account when planning, we can reduce and limit them.

You could do this in a notebook, spreadsheet, or with a set of sticky notes, but I picked something else.

Using Trello for my project backlog

There are three reasons I went with Trello.

• It’s free

• It’s simple

• Cal Newport mentioned it in Slow Productivity.

I set up three columns: Backlog, Doing, Done.

Then, I added a list of projects I had on my mind. I gave each card a colour based on the area of my life (Sketchy Ideas is yellow). Finally, I created labels for impact and effort.

Why is everything blanked out? Well, It’s best to keep your goals to yourself.

With this in place, I did a couple of quick wins in a day thanks to the immediate clarity I gained.

Best of all, there are some projects that feel like I should do, but from this matrix, it becomes clear that they are high effort and low or medium impact at best.

It’s no coincidence that those are the things that have taken a lot of mental space.

Action!

It’s easy to use planning and strategy as an excuse for doing nothing.

And if I’m honest, I’ve spent longer reflecting than I would have liked but I’ve already seen the benefits with some quick wins.

Now I can move forward with greater confidence in the actions I’m doing and best of all, not wasting time on don’t match my priorities for this stage in life.

I hope these ideas help you.

— Chris

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