Make decisions easier – narrow down options based on criteria!

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 do with the tool:

• 🗓 Plan yearly activities for your organization.
• 🛣 Create a strategic three-year plan for your startup.
• 🍱 Create a distinctive menu for your restaurant.
• 🎧 Create an authentic playlist for your DJ set.
• 🌃 Choose the best pictures for your next exhibition.
• 📚 Choose works of literature for a chrestomathy.
• 📽 Choose movies for a movie festival.
• 💃 Choose collections for a fashion show.
• 🥇 Choose the winning works at a competition.
• 🚙 Choose a model of a car for your family.
• 👾 Choose which feature requests to implement for your open source project.
• 🗺 Choose your next travel destination.
• 👩🏾‍🔬 Choose the best career path for yourself.
• 🏥 Choose a non-profit organization to support financially.
• 📖 Choose online courses to take.
• 👶🏼 Choose the best name for your soon-to-be-born child.
• 🎙 Choose the best talk proposals for a conference you are organizing.
• 📲 Choose what innovative technologies to integrate into your business products, services, or processes.
• 💼 Choose the best content management system to create your portfolio.
• 🍹 Choose cocktail menu for your bar.
• 📰 Choose the next theme for your monthly magazine.
• 🎤 Choose the live concerts to go to next year.
• 🙇🏻‍♂️ Choose a prospective theme for your diploma work.
• 🏫 Choose the best school for your children.
• 🎅🏻 Choose a restaurant for your company's Christmas party.
• 🏨 Choose a hotel to stay during a conference.
• 🎹 Choose a piano piece to learn to play by heart.
• 🏦 Choose a bank for your savings.
• 💌 Strategically select articles to promote in your monthly newsletter.
• 📺 Choose TV shows to produce on your television for the next season.
• 🧘🏻‍♀️ Choose a type of meditation for your well being.
• 🌍 Choose a hotel for the attendants of an international project.
• 🛒 Choose marketing tactics for your products.
• 🗞 Choose the news websites and newspapers to subscribe to.
• 🛡 Choose a security company for your shop.
• 🏛 Choose a university to study.
• 🤩 Choose animation style for your product's introductory videos.
• ☕️ Choose a coffee for your cafe.
• ⏱ Choose productivity tools to adopt.
• 🏸 Choose a right sport to take.
• 🍊 Choose the type of trees to plant in your garden.
• 🍼 Choose a pram for your soon to be born baby.
• ⌚️ Choose a watch for your business appearance.
• 🎭️ Choose a musical to go to next year.
• ️🎸 Choose a guitar model for your concerts.

We do not exaggerate. It's up to your imagination. 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:

✨✨✨ ✨✨✨

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.