How to Prioritize (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

How to Prioritize

[JohnK]

A very cool post, Steve.

Using this method, I found that: 1) the health routine I had already set as first priority was indeed the first priority under this method; 2) building a Web site about the career I'm launching was actually a higher priority than making money from that career. The return will be faster, and the target is more vulnerable and more recognizable.

Thanks!

JK

[IsraeliSpeculator]

Probably my weakest point. I am a victim of starting something, and then going to something else, and then to something else..... well you got the point
I think its best to use this blindly to save me from myself.

[Amit_S]

Hey Steve!
I think I remember reading something similar in a book authored by Richard Machowicz (or Macho-something). Cant recall it for sure. He was a Navy Seal and based his strategies for personal development on what he learned in the Navy. Nice blog by the way.

1 more thing- I've never directly mailed you or put up a direct reply to any of your blog or forum entries. I just want to say thanks for your blog articles and these forums. Quite a few of these articles were life-changing moments for me.
Thanks a lot My fav is 'The Message v/s The Medium'. WOW!

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Amit_S

Hey Steve!
I think I remember reading something similar in a book authored by Richard Machowicz (or Macho-something). Cant recall it for sure. He was a Navy Seal and based his strategies for personal development on what he learned in the Navy. Nice blog by the way.

CARVER is used by special forces, so it wouldn't surprise me if several SEALs had written about it. I know I've seen it in at least one book penned by a SEAL.

Yesterday I was discussing CARVER with a friend who was in the Air Force, which gave me the idea for the article.

[Josh Kaufman]

Amit_S,

I think the book you're referring to is "Unleash the Warrior Within" by Richard J. Machowicz.

Steve has uncanny timing - I just finished the book, and thought it sounded like something Steve would blog about. :-)

Josh

[Sam988]

Great article. I have this problem too, i get too easily carried away by other tasks before i finish the one i was working on.

I hope this CARVER system help me on it.

[Sukotto]

I listed the main points out in a simpler format to help me internalize them. I post it here in case anyone else finds it useful.

Range is 1 - 5 (inclusive) for each of the six headings

1) Criticality.

Not critical/important to accomplish -> 1
Very critical/important -> 5

2) Accessibility.

Hard to Achieve -> 1
Easy to Achieve -> 5

3) Return.

Small return/payoff -> 1
Big return/payoff -> 5

4) Vulnerability.

Cheap to accomplish -> 1
Expensive -> 5

Cost is measured in some relevant resource like Time, Money, Foregoing other desires, etc.

5) Effect.

Small (positive) impact on your life -> 1
Big impact on your life -> 5

Could also be impact on lives of other people, impact on your other goals, etc.

6) Recognizability. (aka "Clarity")

Hard to quantify/measure steps/next actions -> 1
Easy to quantify -> 5

[learningtogrow]

I have a hard time with what seems like a contradiction to me.
Steve, in previous articles, says to ask yourself the question, "what do I want to experience now" when making decisions/prioritizing, which is how I've been trying to live my day to day recently. No pressure with planning, no attachment to outcomes. Just put out your wants to the universe, and believe it will come. I don't mean I just sit on the couch all day watching t.v. I usually pick something that broadens my experience, but it seems like I'm involved in several things currently without too much physical manifestations at the moment.

This CARVER approach and many other type A systems he writes about, seem so rigid/structured, and filled with pressure rather than joy about what you're doing in the moment. For example, I find myself asking "is working in the garden a priority, even though I want to experience it now?" Maybe I SHOULD instead be out looking for ways to boost my income. I've lived most of my life planning and scheduling. Very type A. However, recently, I just felt like it was just getting me nowhere.

I started researching these people who say, you don't really have to do anything but ask, believe, and receive and most definitely enjoy what you're doing in the moment.

Does anyone have any experience in dealing with this contradiction?

[Iff]

Originally Posted by learningtogrow

[..] For example, I find myself asking "is working in the garden a priority, even though I want to experience it now?" Maybe I SHOULD instead be out looking for ways to boost my income. I've lived most of my life planning and scheduling. Very type A. However, recently, I just felt like it was just getting me nowhere.

[...]

I am sorry if I am pulling this out of the context too suddenly, but I just wanted to give a quick comment on this point. If your priorities do not seem to take you anywhere, perhaps you shouldn't drop the prioritising system, but rather reassess your goals and see how (or if) your day-to-day activities bring you closer to them. Looking for ways to boost your income should definitely go to the first quadrant / top of your list, but if creating a beautiful garden is also a goal you want to work on, or you just finished working on a difficult task and feel like taking a break to ready yourself for the next endeavour, working in the garden is exactly to correct activity to take on this moment.

[Adrienne]

Originally Posted by Sukotto

I listed the main points out in a simpler format to help me internalize them. I post it here in case anyone else finds it useful.

Range is 1 - 5 (inclusive) for each of the six headings

1) Criticality.

Not critical/important to accomplish -> 1
Very critical/important -> 5

2) Accessibility.

Hard to Achieve -> 1
Easy to Achieve -> 5

3) Return.

Small return/payoff -> 1
Big return/payoff -> 5

4) Vulnerability.

Cheap to accomplish -> 1
Expensive -> 5

Cost is measured in some relevant resource like Time, Money, Foregoing other desires, etc.

5) Effect.

Small (positive) impact on your life -> 1
Big impact on your life -> 5

Could also be impact on lives of other people, impact on your other goals, etc.

6) Recognizability. (aka "Clarity")

Hard to quantify/measure steps/next actions -> 1
Easy to quantify -> 5

great simple way to look at it. I am going to print that off.. nice reference.

Steve, enjoyed reading the full version too

Adrienne

[Savage]

I mentioned in the article that the CARVER system is something you can adapt to your own needs. In practice you may want to incorporate other factors such as:

• enjoyment
• happiness
• contribution
• fun
• intelligence
• peacefulness
• income-generation

and so on...

Ideally your matrix should represent a fair reflection of your values. Some people can interpret the existing CARVER terminology to fit their values, while others may prefer to substitute their own terms.

[truthcurve]

I didn't quite understand from Steve's post what exactly Vulnerability is. Can someone please explain?

I like Sukotto's simplified version but I'm wondering if on the Vulnerability factor, the 1 and 5 are reversed. Shouldn't cheap be 5?

Thanks.

TC

The Truth Curve

[ahimel]

Bless you, Steve. It's my turn to say, "OMG! Steve posted this JUST when I needed it!"

Also, thanks to Sukotto for the simplifed ratings. Steve's post explained it better, but I can post Sukotto's scale on my wall.

Have to agree with TC, though. 5 is desirable and 1 is undesirable (so that your ranking at the end uses high numbers to mean things you should go after.) And I like my goals cheap.

[DavidC]

I am truly surprised that this article has received such warm greetings in this forum. To me it is add odds with some of the excellent articles elsewhere on this website.

First, if you need to prioritise, there's too much in your life. You shouldn't be prioritising, but culling. Prioritisation is all about making choices about what you are not going to do.

Second, the things that you choose should come from the heart of your being, or you won't be effective at doing them. A scoring system that applies the same dimensions to everyone, and doesn't weight them according to who you are, cannot have this quality. Those weights are unlikely to be constant even for a single person; what is important when you are young and building a career is different from when you are bringing up a family.

Thirdly, there's no recognition of the interdependence of objectives. I'd like to have a family, something I could likely do quite easily. I'd also like to do have enough money to look after the family. Success in business is by no means guaranteed, so it will tend to rank lower in the CARVER system than starting the family. To me, though, it's a life principle that I won't burden the community by bringing children into the world that I can't look after. Business success is therefore a higher priority than starting a family, but CARVER might give them the opposite ranking. (I understand clearly that others might disagree with this view, but that just reinforces the second point just cited that priorities are individual things.)

Fourthly, the need to use a scoring system to rank activities shows that they have approximately the same different priority in your head. (If the ranking was clear already, you wouldn't need a scoring system.) That in itself is an alarm call to a review of purpose and life direction far more profound than application of a scoring system.

SP himself has written an excellent article that addresses essentially these points at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...g-things-done/

The promise of this article, by contrast, is that if you just follow this checklist, your life will be on the right course. Am I alone in thinking this is misguided?

[shnu]

I agree with DavidC that this post has a rather different tone than other of his posts; that said, I am all in favour of Steve varying his style, and indeed, despite the slightly brutal tone, this is one of my favourite posts.

There's one factor that seems to be missing from the six-point analysis that is surely indispensible in military planning, and is also clearly relevant to personal effectiveness, namely command effectiveness, or one's fitness to execute a plan. For the military, situational training and morale will be among the crucial factors here; for personal effectiveness, goal-orientedness and tendency to procrastinate. I find it hard to credit that the military make their plans using analytical tools that do not explicitly account for such factors; certainly medical planning for catastrophes does.

Just to avoid risk of misunderstanding, indeed one can sort of account for these issues under the accessibility, vulnerability and recognizability factors, and indeed Steve says of recognizability "Is your project crystal clear or totally fuzzy?". I'd say, though, that this weakness makes the tool less "simple and effective" than it should be.

I am, however, motivated to try to rework this tool; I am very happy to have read and thought about Steve's take on CARVER. I'd be very interested to learn more about the original military planning tool that it is based on. Is there a reference?

[shnu]

I've spent some time hunting the .mil sites, but have found very little discussion or analysis of the term. It's in the DTRA acronyms list exactly as Steve described it, and it's mentioned as one of a number of "assessment tools", but beyond that, not a whole lot.

It's surely not a great big secret, if there are top selling self-help books that feature it as one of their main angles. You'd think there would be something in the syllabi at the Westpoint DMI, but no.

So what's up? Is CARVER an important assessment tool or not?

[truthcurve]

[QUOTE]

Originally Posted by DavidC

I am truly surprised that this article has received such warm greetings in this forum. To me it is add odds with some of the excellent articles elsewhere on this website.

DavidC's post got me thinking about this tool more and I think there is no contradiction with other things. I see this as a tool, that, like other tools, depends on context. I think the key to using this is to use it WITHIN a life domain and not ACROSS domains. Steve did not use the best examples in his matrix because he was using examples from across domains of life rather than within domains.

<snip>

Thirdly, there's no recognition of the interdependence of objectives. I'd like to have a family, something I could likely do quite easily. I'd also like to do have enough money to look after the family. Success in business is by no means guaranteed, so it will tend to rank lower in the CARVER system than starting the family. To me, though, it's a life principle that I won't burden the community by bringing children into the world that I can't look after. Business success is therefore a higher priority than starting a family, but CARVER might give them the opposite ranking. (I understand clearly that others might disagree with this view, but that just reinforces the second point just cited that priorities are individual things.)

I completely agree, which is why I say one should use it within a domain of life. This not the right tool to use to decide if making friends should be a higher priority than starting a business. And, it will fail miserably if you do that. Those kinds of goals are not "prioritizable" because they cover different domains of life and you can do all of them simulatenously. However, within each domain, you can use this system to help you decide the best course of action for a very specific goal. For example, if my goal at work is to get a promotion and there are 3 potential projects I could work on, I could use this system to decide which project will give me the most bang for my buck. Which project can get me closer to that promotion? Or, if I'm trying to buy a house, which house should I buy?

<snip>

The promise of this article, by contrast, is that if you just follow this checklist, your life will be on the right course. Am I alone in thinking this is misguided?

I don't think that's the message. I think Steve caused confusion by bringing disparate activities into a matrix that really only works if you use it for one very specific goal at a time.

TC

The Truth Curve

[shnu]

Originally Posted by truthcurve

I completely agree, which is why I say one should use it within a domain of life. This not the right tool to use to decide if making friends should be a higher priority than starting a business. And, it will fail miserably if you do that. Those kinds of goals are not "prioritizable" because they cover different domains of life and you can do all of them simulatenously. However, within each domain, you can use this system to help you decide the best course of action for a very specific goal. For example, if my goal at work is to get a promotion and there are 3 potential projects I could work on, I could use this system to decide which project will give me the most bang for my buck. Which project can get me closer to that promotion? Or, if I'm trying to buy a house, which house should I buy?

It maybe possible to do a CARVER-like analysis which does take into account goal interdependence, if adds additional columns to represent either supporting (+ve) or conflicting (-ve) with each interdependent goal.

[wowik]

To my mind CARVER system is good at prioritizing high-level goals or projects, but too complex for prioritizing small tasks, taking sometimes more time to prioritize than to complete the task

For small tasks I'd prefer using Covey's Urgent/Important Matrix, which works perfectly in Allen's GTD as well. In order to be used for prioritization Urgent/Import Matrix can be given following scores, for example:
4 - urgent & important
3 - urgent & not important
2 - not urgent & important
1 - not urgent & not important

[DivaLion]

I tend to like Steve's more "brutal" posts, I find...I often feel that I have so deeply internalized the teachings from the "softer side" of personal development, that Steve's more difficult, kick-in-the-butt posts pose a welcome challenge to me. (For me, there's also a clear difference in my reactions to challenging articles, between "definitely not something I'm interested in right now" and "ow...hey! no! get that laser beam out from between my eyes!" that's a little uncomfortable but in a "truth hurts" kinda way. *g* The latter is something I know I need to think about and use *because* I'm feeling resistance.)

ANYWAY! =) The CARVER system ended up being a "truth hurts" sort of post for me, not because I had any resistance to the system itself (rather, I tend to be so overcurious and full of plans and ideas that I welcomed something cut and dried that'd help me sort them out) but because I minimized the article window, wrote up a CARVER chart on the spot, and then had to deal with the ouchie reality of which of my many queued up projects should be put on hold indefinitely. My problem, it seems, is not prioritizing but letting go!

It was a big reality check to see that "clean/organize house" is, on the whole, an item not worth much of my time (time to get a cleaning service...) while improving my finances and my health/fitness were very big items.

I think any rigidity in the system is offset by the simple factor of free will. For example, I could see that a lot of cleaning and organizing tasks didn't make the cut of top tasks worth my time & resources in and of themselves, but because I'm hosting a big party at the end of the month, I could accept that they *had* to get moved up the list for a short time until the party's over. Similarly, one or two tasks that did make the cut might end up getting done before the highest-ranked project, because they can be done quickly, be done *with*, and will continue to affect my life as I work on the lengthier projects. But at least I had a clear, measurable way to make those choices, which was really the help that I needed.

Finally-- I tinkered with the categories a bit, and added one for Urgency (meaning a specific, upcoming, inflexible timeframe as opposed to Criticality, which to me was how big a part of the Big Picture it is) and one that measured whether something I could be done with quickly vs. something that requires an ongoing investment of time without a foreseeable end. Then I added a column for Overlap, and gave each project a point for every other goal on the list that it intersects with (for example, completing one film-related goal helps a few other film-related goals). I did two totals, one counting the overlap, and one without.

Totaling with the overlap, I felt, gave me a better structure for attending to "mundane" projects that have a bigger ripple effect than they seem to on their own, as well as the more obviously big-picture ones, and helped me see which items were best poised to do the most good across the board in my life.

The total minus the overlap column was actually not much different (telling me that the items that fell into both are of highest importance overall), but gave me more of a big-picture view of which projects will advance specific major goals in my life. I found both totals valuable and I liked the added benefit of contemplating which of my goals and projects are loners and which ones are integrated into bigger plans. I also felt that this column helped me to see where I might be able to combine tasks to save time (for example, using a film blog [Project 1] to increase my networking within the local film community [Project 2]).

Sorry for the long long post, but I thought these modifications might be useful to others, and I also wanted to share how jazzed I am to tackle my project list now that I've used this tool to sharpen my focus!

[bigadam]

Originally Posted by wowik

To my mind CARVER system is good at prioritizing high-level goals or projects, but too complex for prioritizing small tasks, taking sometimes more time to prioritize than to complete the task

For small tasks I'd prefer using Covey's Urgent/Important Matrix, which works perfectly in Allen's GTD as well. In order to be used for prioritization Urgent/Import Matrix can be given following scores, for example:
4 - urgent & important
3 - urgent & not important
2 - not urgent & important
1 - not urgent & not important

I am a HUGE fan of Covey's approach.

Covey's recommendation is that your most valuable time is the time spent in quadrant 2 listed above (not urgent and important). This is your goal planning, long term growth that will really help you on your path to success.

The first and third quadrant is stuff you want to pass along to others if you can.

So my day looks like this:

Start the day with quadrant 4, move to quadrant 2 and all the while delegate 1's and 3's.