After feeling confused and overwhelmed for some time, I returned to the trusty online prioritizer Wednesday morning. A lot of my confusion was due to trying to sort through my work options too many ways at once. I decided to use the prioritizer on the same list of work actions, three different ways.
First I sorted the list according to pleasure. "Which one will give me more pleasure as I do it?" I copied and pasted the results into a Word document. (Notepad would do fine too.)
Then I sorted the same list according to cash flow. "Which one will bring in $ faster?" Of course this is just a guess on my part.
Then I sorted the list according to goal satisfaction. "Which will give me more satisfaction?" I'm thinking of my longterm goals here.
Not surprisingly, I got three different priority orders this way. No wonder I was having trouble knowing what to do. My intuition was all tangled up with these conflicting values.
Solution? MS Excel, what else? I made an Excel worksheet with a column for each value, and had Excel tell me the average. OK, I know it would have been as fast with a calculator or even in my head, but I enjoy getting Excel to do the few things I know how to persuade it to do for me.
You're welcome to try my Excel prioritizing worksheet. Feel free to adapt it however you wish. It's set up for ten items. Just delete any rows you don't need, or use Edit/Clear Contents. You can save the worksheet as an Office template if you really like it.
Since Wed. I've been happily working on my top two priorities, feeling much more comfortable about NOT working on the other things. I'll get to them later. Meanwhile, I've gotten untangled and know where to focus.
11:14:39 PM 
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