Why a Decision Matrix Can Help You (logo powering up) - Do you sometimes struggle with making decisions? Maybe you've got an awful lot of ideas on your plate but you're having trouble deciding which one you should pursue first. Well, in this video I wanna show you how to use a decision-making matrix so you can make smarter decisions and choose the things that are best for you.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. Studies would say that we have something like 50,000 different thoughts each and every day. You probably have a number of projects that you'd like to pursue, but you're not sure where you should be focusing your time and effort. It's really important that we choose correctly because you only have so much time this week, this month, or this year.
So in this video, I wanna show you how I use a Decision Matrix, right here within Notion. A little later on, I'll show you how to create your very own so you can customize it for your own needs.
How I Use a Decision Table in Notion
So here we have a fairly simple Decision Matrix. The idea of such a tool is to help you quantify the different projects and ideas you're considering pursuing and help you decide which one you should focus on next. I've got a few very simple columns here but they're gonna help me get to a better decision down the road.
On the left-hand side, I've got the names of my different projects. Yes, I've just been very creative (chuckles) with my latest ideas, cool ideas, things like that. But of course, these are real projects for you and real projects for my business that we are trying to evaluate here.
In the next four columns, I have different criteria in which I'm going to evaluate these projects. The first one is Impact, meaning how much of an impact is this going to have on my business? The second one is Effort, in terms of how much time and effort it's going to take me to complete this project.
This is really important when you're deciding on what you should be pursuing next because if something is going to have a major impact but it's also gonna take an awful lot of time, maybe there's some other things that will take you less effort and time but have just as much impact.
As we see in the next column, maybe it can also increase your profits or whatever criteria you want to evaluate your projects on. Profitability is pretty straightforward in this particular example. What is the potential to bring in additional revenue or to be profitable?
The last one that I have here in this example is something called Vision, meaning how much does this particular project or idea align with my vision or my values or what I'm striving to do here within the Simpletivity training business? Last but not least, we have a Score, which is really great because we want to either average out or sum up these numbers so that we can decide which of these projects we should be pursuing next.
As you can see, I've already given all of these projects a score, and they really do vary. Right here, I've got something like the idea that came in a dream, which is going to have a major impact on my business, or so I think. But here, my really big idea, although it's a great idea, I've got lots of energy around it, I've only given it a score of one. I really don't think it's gonna have as much of an impact.
Later on here, and I wanna clarify what Effort is defined as in this case. Again, you can customize this for your own needs. In Effort, I'm giving a high score for something that is actually going to take the smallest amount or the shortest amount of time. The reason being is that if you are going to sum up these numbers or average out these numbers, you want a positive score or a great score here in all of your categories.
So the higher the number, in this case, the better. So when I have a five or some of these fours, this actually means that it's not going to take a significant amount of effort, compared to my really big idea which I've given it a score of three. If I've given something a score of one, that means it's gonna take an awful lot of effort and therefore not get as high of a total score.
What I've done here at the end is I've decided to average it out. Since I've given everything here a score from one to five, I've decided that my end score should be reflective of that. You could choose to use this as a sum total, and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.
Here I can see that this one here, this idea that came to me in a dream, has an overall score or an average of four. You can see why. It's got a five for effort, two fours, and a three. Now I've got something here above it, this cool idea which is rather close, set at 3.5.
It's still not gonna take a whole lot of effort, it should have a big impact, scored the highest when it came to profitability, but it perhaps didn't align with my vision quite as much. That's why it resulted in this 3.5. The other thing that you may want to consider when using this approach is that you may want to weigh one or two of these criteria a little heavier or lighter than others.
For example, if we look at something like Profitability and Vision, maybe I shouldn't give them equal weight. Maybe it's important that their vision is close to or in line with my own vision, but maybe I want to give extra weight to Profitability in this case.
One of the key reasons why I use this in Notion is that not only is it very easy to set up and create but it's very easy to add a new idea and also not be skewed by the data that's already existing here. Let's say that I'm accumulating these ideas as I'm thinking about what I want to do in the next quarter or maybe in the second half of this year.
Instead of just typing in new here and starting to go across here in a horizontal manner and giving these scores, that might skew my perspective because I'm gonna see the other scores right up here above.
Instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the new button here in the top right-hand corner. The great thing here is that it sort of blocks my vision of the rest of the table. So I'm gonna say my Latest Idea for Q2, that's what I'm gonna call it here.
Then I can come down and look at these criteria one by one. Effort, I'm gonna say, this is gonna take actually minimal effort in this case, so I'm gonna give it about a four. Remember, the higher the score, the less effort in this particular case.
When it comes to Impact, I'm gonna say maybe not as much, I'm gonna give it a two. Profitability, sort of middle of the road, I'm gonna give it a three here. Lastly, I'm gonna say when it comes to Vision that this is pretty much in line. So I'm gonna give this a four.
Now you'll notice that this isn't quite in the right order that I want it to be. The great thing with Notion is that you can drag and drop almost anything. So I can have that score here at the end. I can add some further notes here, further details about this idea or this project as well if I want to.
Now, I can come back to my table, and here is my latest idea for Q2. I can see that it's got an overall score of 3.25. Now, does this mean that I'm automatically going to pursue this one that has the highest score? No.
You should keep this in mind as you play around and decide to use these types of decision-making tools. It should just really give you food for thought. It's gonna give you some quantitative data here to help you decide what you should be doing next. But I do not recommend that you automatically select the one with the highest score. This is really just a means for you to evaluate and perhaps refine your decision-making process.
How to Build a Decision Matrix in Notion
First thing we'll need to create a new page here within Notion. So I'm gonna call this one a Decision Table, in this particular example. Instead of just creating an empty page, we want to come down to Database and select Table here within Notion.
Now, by default, whenever you start any table within Notion you're going to start with a Name column and a Tags column, but it's so easy to edit these things as we go about this process. Instead of Name, I'm going to call this Project or maybe Idea in this case because that's what we're evaluating, and we can leave it as a name.
But we're not gonna be making use of tags here within the Notion database. So in this case, I'm gonna come down here and choose a Number. In this case, I'm going to use the criteria Impact, alright. Let's add a few more here for our example.
The second one here again, is not text, I wanna change that to a Number, and we're gonna call this one Effort. Let's add one more to our example here. Once again, we want to choose Number, and in this case, let's call this one Vision, similar to what we saw in the first example.
Now we can go ahead and start filling out our projects or our ideas and giving them some type of quantitative value. You don't have to limit yourself to a score between one and five, you could choose one and ten or any other numeric value that you like.
The key thing here is that we need some type of quantitative data so that we can sum up or average that data at the very end of this table. So even if I start to add in an idea, let's just call this one Idea number one, I can come in here and start entering the values.
Effort of four, maybe it's an impact of two, but the vision is very much in line so it's a five. That's great, and I can keep filling out this data down below. But we want to get some type of final or cumulative score at the very end so that we can compare them head-to-head against each other.
So in this last column here, what we're going to do instead of choosing a Number we need to come down to Advanced and select a Formula. Now, if you're not familiar with creating or editing formulas here within Notion, no problem. I'm going to show you a very, very simple formula even if you've never used formulas here within Notion.
Under the column that we just selected here, we want to come down and select Edit Formula. Now, what Notion does is it gives us some of the most common properties, both the properties that we've created here within the table, but it also gives us a variety of other factors and criteria that we can use to make these calculations.
We're going to keep it super basic for our needs today. So all we need to do is come down here and select the properties that we want to add or subtract or average, in this case. So I'm going to select Impact, because that's the first one in my column, and then I'm going to add a Plus symbol.
Next, I'm going to add Effort, and then once again, I'm going to hit the Plus symbol. Last but not least, we have our third criteria, which is Vision. And so that's essentially all we want to do. In fact, as you can see here above it's actually doing this in real-time to make sure that we're getting the value that we're after.
All I need to do in this case is select Done. Now I've got my sum total of this particular row. That's exactly what I want here. The last thing that I may want to do is that I've left this as the title of the column, that's maybe not that helpful, so I can come here and change that to Score.
So now when I have my second idea, I'm going to select New here and I'm going to call this Idea number two. I can come down here to Effort and start filling in my different variables here. I can say the Vision is, ah, it's only about a two as well.
If the Score is not listed in the place where you want it to be, remember you can always drag and move these around as well. Now when I come back to my Decision Table I instantly have that score. I can see this is almost half of my first idea. So I should probably consider doing my first idea.
The last thing that I'd like to show you here is that it may be helpful to you to add a default sort order. So when we select Sort here, what we can do is add a Sort. In this case, what I want it to do, is I want to actually sort it by its score, and I want to sort it by descending in this case.
So now what I'll have is always the idea with the highest score sorted to the very top. So no matter how many things that I list here within this table, I can see the one with the highest score at the very top. Now, I'd love to know what other tools you are using to help you make better decisions. Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.
