Prioritization Framework: Find what deserves your focus.

Recently, I was feeling extremely anxious about the things I wanted to do in my life. As a naturally curious person, I was caught with multiple different things I wanted to invest my time in but knew I couldn’t tackle everything at once. I had to prioritize!

So, I started thinking about how I can objectively decide what to prioritize.

(If you don't feel like reading, you can skip to the end of this article and watch my YouTube video)

I categorized my thoughts into four core categories:

1. Internal Desire
2. Relevancy
3. Financial Prospects
4. Time to Value

In addition to these core categories, I also considered  two complimentary categories:

1. Urgency
2. Effort

I bucketed Urgency & Effort into complimentary categories because I believe effort and urgency can really be deciding factors but might not be extremely important in initial elimination of ideas from 10 to 3. But from 3 to 1, they’re valuable.

So let’s start with the four core categories:

Internal Desire

Internal Desire is crucial bur hard to measure yet difficult to quantify. We are humans and most of the time we make decisions that are based on our gut feeling or when we are passionate about something. Explaining your gut feeling or trying to add logic to it can be difficult at times but it can be the voice of reason. It also allows you to be introspective and ask yourself about what you genuinely  want to pursue. . Internal desire is an honest conversation with yourself to uncover how far you’re willing to go to achieve your goal.

Relevancy

Our lives are a moving target – today we care about abstract art, tomorrow we’re into structure architecture. Our tastes evolve over time as we expose ourselves to different things and experiences so understanding how relevant something is in our life is critical to prioritizing it. Something that we want might just not be relevant to our current circumstances and relevancy might come into play to help us do the right thing. Answering the question of relevancy can really help us filter out ideas we really want but the time is not right.

Financial Prospects

Let’s be honest, : money matters more than we want it to. Anything in life we prioritize will have a financial element attached to it so this one is a no brainer. Anything you’re thinking about as a core life decision needs to be thought about from a financial perspective. The goal is to figure out the long term financial value. You will be dedicating your time to work on this specific idea and unless you’re doing something for core selfless reasons, then you need to attach financial value to your idea. Think of your time as currency that you’ll be giving away in exchange for something in the future that must be exponentially greater than your current time investment.

Time to Value

This one is tricky because we will end up either underestimating it or overestimating it significantly. Getting it just right is nearly impossible. The reason I’ve put it in is because I believe time to value forces us to think about when we can expect the reward but most importantly it forces us to map out the journey into the future. It allows us to think about the steps involved in achieving our goal. We think about step one, step two and all the steps along the way until we reach our final destination. It allows us to unearth the complexity of the task at hand and think about all the obstacles that we might face along the way. So it’s a crucial attribute to consider when we’re prioritizing goals.

Now, let’s combine the four attributes and see it in action.

Let’s see the actual framework in action:

Here we can see that A is a clear winner but C looks interesting.

We do have differences in relevancy but they both have high value for money so we still need to nail down our highest priority. So now we’ll introduce two more variables:

1. Urgency
2. Effort

Urgency allows us to think about the external factors that might want us to prioritize A over B. For example, there might be an age limit to a competition that you want to win or you want to be a Fitness YouTuber and you’re losing your physical edge so that might be a case where urgency levels go up - you need to get A done quickly.

Effort again allows you to dissect A and B. Think about the level of effort required to achieve A relative to B. It’s not about thinking about effort in silo - it’s about comparing A and B to figure out which would require more effort to achieve regardless of the same expected value or outcome.

Again, since we have two variables, all we need is a 2x2 matrix to plot out the values and find our answer.

So clearly, A deserves our attention and focus.

So let’s recap.

1. We jot down multiple things that we want to get done.
2. We think about each goal and rate it across four core attributes.
3. First we look at internal desire
4. Second we look at relevancy to our current state
5. Third we evaluate financial prospects
6. Fourth we estimate the time it will take us to get value.

The goal of this exercise is to take 10 top ideas and filter them down into 3 top ones.

1. Then we take the top three ideas and estimate the urgency of each idea and t​​he effort it will require to accomplish it.
2. We map it on a 2x2 matrix as shown below and viola, we’ll have our winner idea that we have shortlisted after a solid thought process that we need to prioritize above all.

There you have it. Now, you have a very comprehensive yet lightweight framework on objectively prioritizing the most promising idea that deserves your time and dedication.

I also made a YouTube video: