Get clarity and focus on your priorities with "1st things 1st"

1st things 1st is a strategic prioritizer for your personal or business projects.

Use this online tool to figure out priorities for a list of any kind of immaterial or material things. Spend your time, money, and energy only on what is relevant to you.

Sort the most essential immaterial things such as goals to achieve, activities to act on, ideas to implement, things to take, technologies to adapt.

Or choose your most optimal material things, such as goods to buy, presents to give to your loved ones, artworks to exhibit, a car to drive, or home to live.

The tool comes with custom-tailored practical project templates for personal or business prioritizations. You start a new project by answering a few simple questions.

Then prioritization at 1st things 1st happens in 4 steps:

1. Define criteria
2. List out things
3. Evaluate things by each criterion
4. Explore priorities

1st things 1st can be used to choose your best of any list of options, but it is most helpful in making long-term or irreversible decisions. Get inspired by this series of things you can prioritize with the tool:

We do not exaggerate. The sky is the limit. And we have an ever-growing list of project templates to start with.

You will prioritize things in 4 steps.

At first, you will enter the success criteria for your project. These should be somewhat measurable categories, like "Original", "Practical", "Affordable". For each criterion, you can also set how important it is to you compared to other criteria.

Second, you will brainstorm an extensive list of things that you want to prioritize. Most likely it will be things, ideas, products, objects, or elements.

Third, when you are ready with the criteria and the list of things to prioritize, you will evaluate each item by each criterion, such as how original, how practical, and how affordable each thing is.

At last, when evaluations are done, you get the prioritized results. They are sorted by importance and grouped into things to do for sure, things to consider, and things to skip. You can print out the priorities or send them to someone by email.

You are the best judge of your own life and work. Use your own experience, deepest instincts, and intuition to give evaluations for each thing by each criterion.

If you are trying to create a strategic plan for your organization, you can ask members of your team to evaluate thing by the criteria they are best knowledgeable about. For example, if usability is one of your criteria for a software project, then user-experience designer of your team is the best fit to evaluate things by this criterion.

If it's a team project and you all have different experiences and points of view, you can also vote for each evaluation.

If your field of interest is complex or risky, make sure to do a research and collect enough information about it in advance. Get prepared for the evaluations. And prioritize without hurry at the dedicated time.

This tool can be best used for long-term or irreversible decisions.

For organizations and companies, it is common to create three-year plans and adjust them every year. You can do the same for personal pursuits. You can create and adjust your life-vision at least once a year. A life with a vision is more purposeful, meaningful, and progressive.

If you want to use the strategic prioritizer more often, you are welcome to do that. For example, we use 1st things 1st regularly to sort out all new ideas for the 1st things 1st itself.

The priorities are calculated from your evaluations using the magical weighted average formula:

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A - total weighted average evaluation for a thing.
n - amount of criteria.
w_i - relative weight for each criterion in percentage.
g_i - grade for the thing evaluated by that criterion.

There are two important rules:

1. Do not judge people!
2. Use this prioritizer only for good.

You are always welcome to ask questions at the feedback form. We usually answer to everybody in 2 working days.