Prioritize, is the Quality of a Successful person that we will be sharing today. I'm glad that now you know what you want. But that's not enough now you have to prioritize and get things in order. Because there are always choices to be made, and it won't be any different with your goals. So, it might be a good idea to write your goals down in priority order. The list doesn't have to be set in stone since things are subject to change. But if you get confused or off track refer back to your list. Most would agree that being able to prioritize is key when your trying to achieve something. But being able to prioritize is hard, it's hard for most of us to decide which task is really the most important at any given time? Is it the one that’s most urgent, the one that will earn you the most money, the one that will produce the greatest long-term happiness, the one that will please your boss the most? In a article called "How to Prioritize" by Steve Pavlina, he says "If you don’t use an intelligent method of prioritization, you’ll lack consistency and bounce from one task to another with no rhyme or reason". In his article he shared a simple and effective prioritization method adapted from the military. And I wanted to post it here for an example on how you might prioritize your daily works whatever it may be.

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"How to Prioritize" by Steve Pavlina Click Here


From a pure military (i.e. non-political) standpoint, the goal of any engagement is to achieve victory by inflicting the greatest damage on your enemy with the least amount of resources. Wouldn’t you say this is the essence of personal time management as well? You want to make the greatest amount of progress towards your goals with the least amount of effort.

Objective

For prioritization to have any meaning, it’s imperative that you have a clear objective. For the military your overall objective may be to achieve a decisive victory. Your personal objective may be a set of goals, your mission statement or purpose, or even a state of being. The role of prioritization then is to help you achieve this result with as little effort as possible.

Resources

The second consideration is the resources you have available. Military resources include troops, guns, tanks, bombs, planes, fuel, supplies, etc. Your personal resources include time, money, your social network, your physical energy, and so on. Time is generally your scarcest resources because it cannot be replenished.

Prioritization

Now in order to prioritize intelligently, we need a method that tells us how to evaluate projects in terms of their overall importance. Which projects will help us achieve our objectives most efficiently?

CARVER

A key component of military strategy is selecting the most important targets to attack. But how do you know which targets are the most important? Centuries of warfare have provided us with a reasonably intelligent answer.

CARVER is an acronym for a military method of target selection. CARVER stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Return (or Recuperability), Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability. I’ll explain what these are in a moment.

For every potential target, we assign a value of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) for each CARVER factor, thereby creating a CARVER matrix. Then by summing the six CARVER values, we can calculate a total score for each target, and those scores represent the targets’ relative prioritization. The higher the CARVER score, the more “important” a target becomes.

Now lets explore the six CARVER factors, and consider how we can apply them to personal projects.

Criticality. How critical is the target with respect to the main objective? Will it move you significantly closer to your goal, or is it a relatively puny and insignificant item? A low criticality project might be cleaning out your garage. It would be nice to do, but it’s probably not going to make that much difference in your life.

Accessibility. Can you actually reach the target, or is it so well defended that attacking it directly is impossible? Do you have the means to tackle this project immediately, or does it have prerequisites? Starting a new business might not be very accessible if you work long hours and are living paycheck to paycheck, but asking for a promotion may be very accessible.

Return. In military operations the term Recuperability is used here, referring to how quickly the enemy can recover from the destruction of the target. There’s little point in attacking a target that can be rebuilt or replaced with minimal effort. For personal effectiveness we’ll use Return instead. How great is the expected return on your commitment of resources? Developing a new passive income stream may yield a significant return, while watching the news may yield virtually none.

Vulnerability. How vulnerable is the target? What amount of resources will be required to take it out? How vulnerable are the projects you’re considering? A one-day project will score a high vulnerability rating, while a six-month project will score much lower. Similarly, an inexpensive project is more vulnerable than an expensive one.

Effect. If you successfully destroy the target, how widespread will the impact be? If you successfully complete your project, what effect will it have on your life as well as the lives of others? Writing a best-selling book may have a significant effect, while completing your tax return will have very little effect.

Recognizability. Can we see the target well enough to attack it, or is it highly camouflaged or mobile? Is your project crystal clear or totally fuzzy? How easy is it to recognize the steps necessary to complete the project? Have you completed this type of project before, or will you have to figure out the steps as you go along? Clear goals with clear steps will score higher on recognizability than foggy goals with unclear steps.

Now let’s see how we can create a CARVER matrix to prioritize certain projects. The 1-5 rankings for each factor are simply for the sake of example, so your own rankings may vary. Keep in mind that these rankings are all relative to your primary objective, mission, or purpose.

See Article for Example of Table