Learning. Life.

How to prioritise anything in 5 easy steps

Posted on 26 January 2008

This simple prioritising method comes from What Color Is Your Parachute. You can use it to prioritise goals, tasks, purchases, desert choices … any list which you can’t prioritse just by looking at it.

Let’s say you have four goals this year: to exercise more, to eat better, to get organised, and to write every day. You know from The Habit Guy that you need to choose one thing to work on at a time, but you can’t decide what to do first.

Here’s what to do:

1. Put these four goals into a table like this:

2. Compare goal 1 with goal 2: Should I exercise more first or eat better first? Hmmm … hard choice. If I exercise first I’ll be fitter and have more energy, but if I eat better first I’ll have more energy too. Exercising will take a lot of effort – but I could easily eat better. OK – I’ll eat better first.

Great – one decision down. Write number “2″ in the square where the row for goal 1 and the column for goal 2 meet:

3. Compare goal 1 with goal 3: Should I exercise more first or write every day first? This is easier – getting in shape is more important for me right now. Write number “1″ in that square:

4. Keep going til you’ve filled in all the white squares (compare goals 1 and 4, 2 and 4 etc). When you’re finished your completed table might look like this:

5. Count up the number of times you chose each goal. The goal you chose most wins.

Here I chose goal 2 three times, goal 1 twice, and goal 4 once. So the order in which I should tackle these goals is to eat better first, then exercise more, then get organised, and finally start writing every day.

I never chose goal 3, so should it should drop off the list altogether? In this case I might decide I want to do it, but after the other three, or I might decide that it’s not a big priority for me after all.

Happy prioritising!