Have you ever had a big decision to make, and you just can't make up your mind? You make a list of pros and cons, but each choice has a pretty even amount of each, or maybe the things in which you're deciding between have about the same amount of items in the pro columns, but a couple items are more important to you?
Well, I have a very simple way to help you properly weigh those decisions - mathematically. It's called a decision matrix. I thought I came up with this idea back in college, but it turns out it has been around in just about every industry there is; it's just not often used for common analysis and decision making, for everyday life.
Our experience:
My husband and I used this very objective system to make one of the biggest and hardest decisions in our lives. We were living in Newport, RI. We'd never been stationed overseas. We had four young kids. His detailer presented him with three options for our next tour: Hawaii, Italy, or Japan (all VERY far away from the east coast!). My husband said "Hawaii, all the way". I said, "No way - I want to go to Italy". As we discussed our reasons for our choice and the importance of each reason, it made our decision less clear, instead of more.
So, together we came up with a list of what criteria was important to us for the next tour. Then, I took a turn at weighting each of those criteria (from 1 to 10). Next, I rated each location upon that criteria factor. Lastly, I multiplied the factor times the rating, and then added them up for each location. My husband did the exact same thing. The funny thing, is that JAPAN was the clear winner for each of us! We'd never considered going there until we did this. We discussed it some more, and eventually, that's the call we made! Some changes were made to his orders, but we asked for Japan, and ended up getting a billet there (although a different type of job)! We lived there two years, and loved it!
Try it out!
Anyway, if you'd like to see what I'm talking about, or use this tool, I made up a simple matrix on Excel. You can download it here. The one I designed for deciding between living in TWO locations (so a similar decision to the one we made). The great thing is that you can apply the same principle to just about anything (choosing a school, a job, a house, etc.)! You can do it for as many choices as you'd like, with as many criteria as you wish. You don't even need the spreadsheet. All you have to do is multiply! :)
How to use it:
If you want to use the tool as it is in the example, this is what you do: Fill in the gray columns, using the scale of 1-10. I think it's better to use a "weighted" analysis, which means you can use any number as much as you want (i.e. you can weight three criteria as a "10" if they're all super important to you).
Need Help?
For anyone less literate in the Excel application, and wanting to use this tool, I'd be happy to help customize it for you!
If this doesn't make sense, I'd be happy to help explain it more clearly!
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