We are surrounded by advice on how to live and work better. Redesign your life, manage your moods, deal with toxic people, become more productive. Some of this advice is genuinely useful. A good idea can shift our perspective; introduce us to a practice we had not considered and sometimes help us deal with a problem more effectively. The difficulty is that borrowed advice often has a short shelf life. We adopt it enthusiastically, follow it for a while and then gradually return to familiar ways of operating.
Perhaps this happens because advice, however sensible, comes from somebody else’s experience. It cannot fully account for our temperament, circumstances, work demands, relationships and the accumulated experience of what has worked for us. Over time, most effective people therefore develop their own ways of operating. They discover when they think best, how they organise their time, what helps them concentrate, how they prepare for important conversations and how they recover when things go wrong. Most of us would never call these personal effectiveness systems, but that is essentially what they are.
There is considerable value in such systems because they have been built through trial and error rather than simply borrowed from someone else. They have survived contact with reality. We have experimented, adjusted and repeated what works. Eventually these practices become part of how we function, and that is precisely where a new risk begins to appear.
If something has worked repeatedly, we naturally stop questioning it. A conscious choice slowly becomes a familiar response, the familiar response becomes a routine, and the routine can eventually become a default. The problem is not the routine itself. Routines are useful because they save time and reduce unnecessary decision-making. The problem begins when we continue applying them automatically even after the situation has changed.
A leader who has learnt to prepare thoroughly may begin overpreparing for everything. Someone who has become effective by responding quickly may struggle to sit with uncertainty. A person who protects time fiercely in order to stay productive may gradually become inaccessible to colleagues. Someone who has learnt to avoid unnecessary conflict may continue doing so when a situation genuinely requires confrontation. None of these approaches is inherently wrong. In fact, they may have contributed significantly to past success. That is exactly why they are difficult to challenge. One useful way to test a personal effectiveness system is to pay attention to the situations where it stops working. When a familiar approach produces a poor result, our first instinct is often to blame the circumstances, the organisation or the other person. Sometimes that explanation is entirely justified. But occasionally the more useful question is whether we have brought an old response to a situation that now requires something different.
This is why personal effectiveness systems need periodic review. We need to ask what should be retained, what needs adjustment and what has outlived its usefulness. This does not mean constantly reinventing ourselves or discarding routines simply because they are old. Some practices may continue to serve us well for decades. The purpose of review is simply to make sure that repetition has not replaced choice.
The most important test is whether our system still expands our ability to respond or has begun to narrow it. The moment “this is what works for me” turns into “this is how I always do it”, the relationship has changed. We created these systems to help us operate more effectively, but once they become unconscious defaults, they can quietly begin to control us.
Your personal effectiveness system should help you decide what to do. It should never start deciding for you.
