Personal projects are the concrete, time-limited sets of actions a person is currently pursuing in order to accomplish a specific goal in a specific life context — things like "finish the grad school application" or "get the garden ready before the frost."
The concept was developed by psychologist Brian Little as a more granular alternative to trait-level description. Where a trait like Conscientiousness describes a stable tendency and a personal striving describes a broad, recurring motive, a personal project is something a person could, in principle, cross off a list. It has a beginning, an end, and a set of concrete steps in between, which makes it possible to study in detail: Little's Personal Projects Analysis method has people list their current projects and then rate each one on dimensions like difficulty, how meaningful it feels, and how much support they have in pursuing it.
That level of detail turns out to matter for wellbeing in ways trait scores don't fully capture. Someone can be low in Neuroticism and still feel drained if their day-to-day projects feel unmanageable or disconnected from what they actually care about — and someone can feel steady and satisfied even under real hardship if their projects feel meaningful and well-supported.
This is part of why personality researchers increasingly treat projects, strivings, and traits as complementary layers of description rather than competing ones.