- select a priority for every item
- trust your gut, but think where necessary
- read through your entries once done to reflect
Why
Exhausted yet? Good news: we're not only almost done with the mentally straining bits, but this is also comparatively easy.
While it is generally more advantageous to consider more data points than fewer, not all of those have the same importance. So - we score all criteria and categories. These “weights” will of course be used in calculating the results, but the activity itself can also highlight where your priorities are. This might be fairly obvious to many, but spelling out how important something is to you, can be put previous assumptions into question and even lead to a shift in perspective.
When revisiting this can also help with communicating with others, as well as understanding how your priorities shift over time. E.g. a year into university you might find that future job security isn't actually important anymore, or that factoring in opinions of your home town was not the best idea. (…or the opposite, you probably get the idea)
In our ranking, we ask you to assign one of five priorities per criterion / category. It is generally advisable to consider every item by itself first, as the relative importance to other things is more likely to skew your thinking into unintentionally influencing your results. Following your instinctual responses here is definitely good. Going through the list a second time afterwards, perhaps giving one or two things another think is also not a bad idea.
For the actual weights we go two steps from “neutral” in both directions, which, if it helps, you can also see them as numeric values. (This is not quite what's happening under the hood, but still):
- -2: could not care less
- -1: it's not important
- 0: pretty neutral
- 1: somewhat relevant
- 2: one of the most important things ever
Additionally, you can note whether something is a must-have, i.e. something that if it doesn't happen, makes options not viable no matter what. We do still evaluate those options however, and strongly recommend at least going through them. Something is also likely to be off if you have more than very, very few must-haves.
As mentioned, categories need to be prioritized as well. We do this to offset the general priorities of criteria, which leads to a clearer emphasis of the relations.
How
You select the priority for each item. Categories first, then criteria. Tap, tap, tap scroll, tap - tap, scroll.
