I came across a program for my Palm a long time ago but ever since my PDA died I hadn’t had the chance to find such a program. It was an application that helped with decision making, using a quantitative method. It’s quite useful when making important decisions and you’re just not sure what to do.
How it works
Make a list of five qualities that are important to whatever you’re deciding on. If you’re deciding between jobs, write down five things that are important in a job (pay, location, schedule, advancement, etc). Then, from a scale from 1 to 10, write their value, their importance to you. Maybe pay is very important, so you’d put a 9. Location might have moderate importance to you so you could put a 5.
Next, write down your options and under each quality you wrote earlier, rank them using the numbers 1 to 10. If the first job option has excellent pay you could put an 8. The second job may have very low pay so you might give it a 2. But, that second job might have a guarantee of advancement so you could put a 10 under that quality. Once you’ve ranked every quality, multiply each number by the importance value from the first list (important qualities). This weights each factor. Career advancement may be guaranteed, but that may be of little importance to you. You must also multiply the numbers on the first list by themselves as you can now compare the results of each options with the target. Simply total the numbers in each list and then divide each option by the target to get a percentage. The larger percentage is the better choice. This can become confusing so look at the sample below.
To download a spreadsheet that makes this simple, click here. Just edit the two options, the important qualities, and enter the rankings! Voila, your best choice will be calculated.
