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5 Pitfalls to Personal Effectiveness

If you have learned to keep all areas of life under control, read another article. But if working from home made you think about improving personal effectiveness, this analysis is for you. Based on personal experience and communication with colleagues, Kirill Beloborodko, a project and people manager at the EPAM Kharkiv office, collected typical mistakes that could drive a newbie into procrastination, instead of helping to do more.

Cyril is a longtime follower of tools to increase personal effectiveness. He actively introduces them not only in his work, but also in almost all areas of life. This spring, when quarantine required most IT professionals to work remotely, they helped him stay productive at home and maintain a healthy work-life balance. At our request, Cyril shares his experience and recommendations with you.



Bit of theory


Over the years of trial and testing, I read many books and tested a number of tools. If you have just started diving into the topic of personal effectiveness, I recommend:

  • David Allen , “How to Put Things in Order. The art of productivity without stress . ” This is a classic. The following books follow and develop Allen's practices.
  • Gleb Arkhangelsk , "Time Drive. How to manage to live and work . ” The book can be treated somewhat critically, but it is one of the most comprehensive sources on time management.
  • Maxim Dorofeev , Jedi Techniques . A relatively new collection of proven performance techniques from various authors.
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After reading any of these books, you will understand that the first, basic skill necessary for personal effectiveness is fixing and describing incoming cases, and after that - entering them into any system. David Allen wrote about analog things like correspondence trays. Now, of course, it is better to use digital tools. At the same time, the basic principle has not changed: tasks should be fixed, grouped into categories and classified by execution time. The classical approach of the Eisenhower matrix is ​​suitable for this.

Well, the key after getting acquainted with theory is to connect practice.

Tools for Efficiency


General tip: no matter how you like paper diaries, think about choosing a digital tool. Of course, the choice is very large and it is important to find an application that will meet your requirements. But you do not have to constantly transfer notes from a notebook to a laptop or smartphone. This, in my opinion, is counterproductive.

Here are the tools I've tried:

  • standard notes and checklists in the smartphone . The most commonplace way, but for starters it is quite convenient;
  • personal board in Trello . A good option, multifunctional and easy to manage small projects. Because many people use it as a personal Kanban board. But for me personally, it was somewhat cumbersome, with excessive details. Maintaining its relevance every day required effort.
  • - Pomodoro. . , . – . . , . 2020 30 . , .
  • Toggl. . . .
  • Todoist . This is the app I ended up with. I conduct work and home tasks in it, form lists of literature and affairs. My Todoist is divided into 7 large categories according to the principles of Stephen Covey. Some categories have internal subsections, and I place tasks in them, marking priority with color codes. I share some with my wife and friends, so you can optimize the overall work on a specific task.

So, you have chosen a tool suitable for yourself and began to pump personal effectiveness, as books taught and as the application suggests. This is where you can get to ...

Beginner Traps


Trap No. 1 . Spend all the time fixing things. This I felt on myself once. If you write down all the tasks to the smallest detail, there will not be enough time for their direct implementation. Set a certain barrier: for example, if it takes less than five minutes to implement, you do not commit, but do it right away. In addition, navigating a to-do list is difficult and inefficient.

Trap No. 2. The whole picture - wide strokes. Another extreme is also possible: the tasks that you fix are too general. If you switched to another priority, then, returning after a week, you risk not remembering which phase you stopped at and what you need to do now. The way out is to develop a digestible “bit-size” format and divide the big task into pieces that can be finalized in half an hour (for example, “prepare the presentation skeleton and send it for approval”). You should not have the fear of not completing the task in a given time and, as a result, the desire to transfer it.

Trap 3. Abstract wording. Tasks should be described in such a way that they are understandable, and the success of their implementation was easy to measure (for example, “Assign a series of phoning”, “Compose a roadmap for the current project”, “Talk with something on such and such a topic” - successful options: “Learn English”, “build knowledge in people-management” - not really). Tasks without specifics migrate every day and run the risk of remaining unfulfilled.

Trap 4. Difficulties with priorities. There are two polar approaches, but choosing one of them is worth sticking to. One says that it is better to start the day with the most difficult task with a high priority (Brian Tracy writes about this in his book “Eat a Frog! 21 Ways to Learn to Time”). Another - offers to start with the “overclocking” tasks, but make sure that the important ones do not migrate from day to day.

Trap No. 5. High expectations. Try to adequately assess the number of cases that you can do in a day. For example, on average you perform 5 tasks. If you plan 10, then it will be difficult to cope with all and the quality may eventually be lame. In addition, leave a time buffer for the "OS". She will always be. It is also useful to sort tasks into tactical and strategic (the latter, of course, will require more time. This should be taken into account when planning).

A couple of unobvious tips


It happens that we get bored with the application and we risk throwing a new good habit . Good "prevention" is thought out by Todoist and in some other tools: the user of the application has karma. It rises when there are no overdue tasks and you complete everything that you have planned. It spurs.

Try to add not only workers, but also other tasks to the application for personal effectiveness. Make a kind of dynamic analogue of the "wheel of life . " This will help you to notice in time which area of ​​life has long required attention.


Make your work calendar your ally! This is especially true for those who actively use it and participate in many meetings. “Lock” on the calendar the time when you need to focus(or have lunch. Sometimes it is vital). At the same time, leave free slots so that colleagues can navigate your schedule without additional clarifications.

In conclusion


You are probably wondering why all this is needed? In my opinion, the techniques of personal effectiveness, used wisely, help to close cycles. David Allen claims in his book that open cycles (that is, things that are not completed) prevent us from moving forward. For me, this thought was the main discovery of his book.

And an effective task management system can both immerse into the stream described by Mihai Chiksentmihayi in the book “Stream. Psychology of optimal experience ”, and deduce from it.



Try to achieve the state of flow, starting in the morning to do not very difficult tasks and moving on increasing. Perhaps this approach will be closer to you than the offer "eat the frog first" from Brian Tracy

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