Life Coach in Your Pocket

Decision Making & Prioritizing

The most obvious use for this tool is to make decisions based on priorities.

By typing each priority into the list, you can reorder them, and make extra notes, until you know what order of importance the aspects play out in.

By shuffling and reordering the elements, you can play and think until you know what to give more importance to when making a choice; what matters the most to you.

On a smaller, day-to-day level, you could simply create and print a to do list... again prioritizing the items in order of importance by dragging and rearranging them until you find the hierarchy that works for you.

By simply dragging and rearranging the text blocks, you can move them around until you find the combination that sits right with you - or is most likely to motivate you to get going.

Understanding

As we've already briefly mentioned, this tool is a great way to illustrate that only element can ever take first priority.

Once you begin with the lists below, and you've listed everything you feel has a bearing on the situation, then you will start rearranging them.

You can do cartwheels and you still won't be able to get more than one element into one space... lol unless you cheat and type two into one block ;)

But even if you did that, you would still read one of them before the either... which still serves to illustrate the point.

You will always have multiple conflicting factors when it comes to prioritizing and decision making, but eventually only one will come first, will take first priority and will be where you put your energy first.

We forget this in the decision making process a lot: trying to give too much importance to too many different influencing factors or parties concerned. So we get overwhelmed trying to balance all the variables.

When you realize that you can only give priority to one element at a time, it helps simplify the whole process, because you know where to put your attention, and what should carry the most weight in your consideration.

Unpacking

When you click to edit the blocks in the tool, they will turn into text areas, and not just text fields.

The reason for this is that you have enough space to write down any additional information that has bearing on that point, and so that you can expand and make notes.

Once you generate the list results, the details you've entered will appear in the view below, and you will be able to click and make even more notes as they come to mind.

Simply seeing the different layout, with the different colors, will trigger your brain to think of additional points, so take the time to read through the generated lists after you've hit the button.

When you hit save to PDF, you'll get a third view of the lists that you can further edit. This will contain all your previous notes. Again this serves to let you see the content with new eyes by putting it in a different format for you.

The save to PDF dialog box that comes up will let you save the document to your device (safely because it never lives on our servers or crosses the Internet!), and you can come back and look at it over the next 24 to 72 hours, as you are mulling your decision.

Comparing

Compare up to four different points of view.

The final way you can use this tool is when you are wanting to compare points of view, say in a conflict or group situation.

If you are personally conflicted internally, then you can create a pros and cons list, using one column for positives, and an other for negatives.

You can also use this to compare - and analyze one by one - conflicting priorities that lie inside you, as you have space to make as many notes as you need in the text areas

You can also use for personal and group SWOT analysis exercises. SWOT stands for Strengths & Weaknesses (Internal), and Opportunities & Threats (External).

Similarly, in group situations, you can list the priorities relevant to each party in the conflict or power struggle, getting a clearer picture of where everyone stands in relation to each other, and showing you where you can leverage to create compromise.

It's always interesting when you do an exercise like this, and break it into elements: often you find points of agreement that never existed before, simply because it was written down in front of you.

The content should not disappear, unless you close the app or refresh the page.... so take your time as you do this.

It's not sitting on a server or crossing the Internet either, and so you can afford to take your time.

We talk about patience a lot, but few know how to put it into practice.

If you allow yourself to develop habits of patience, like taking 72 hours minimum to make a decision, for example, you'll create a habit that will sustain you through basically anything.

Get into the habit of thinking of these things over time, and you will always find ALL the relevant bits of information you need, without letting crucial elements slip through the cracks.