March Wishing Exercise: Prioritising Ideas

If you’ve got a lot of them, wishes, plans or ideas, how do you know which ones are right to run with? Or, if your big, big wish seems so difficult to get to, how can you break down the stages in between and work out what actions you should prioritise? Follow this exercise for an individual plan or group project.

• Start of with a pad of sticky notes and a big clear question like: ‘How do I get to my (biggest ambition)’. Or ‘What could happen to get to (clearly defined destination)’. Or ‘How could we get from here and now to there and then’. Or work through the previous wishing exercises from embody.
• Then write as many separate wishes, ideas or action steps down as you can. Be creative and try to make each idea that goes onto a sticky as simple as possible. If you’re stuck use the Feb exercise NB: at this point you don’t need to know HOW to do each one, they might well seem impossible right now – you’re just getting the facts down. It can help to do this with others. Two heads can be better than one.
• Then arrange the stickies on a large sheet of paper. Below is an illustration of how I lay them out on flip chart paper. You can use different colour stickies for different sorts of ideas if you like.

How to position the stickies:

• One axis asks you ‘My capacity to do this’ from Easy to Hard. So work out how do-able the wish or idea is and place it accordingly.
• The other axis asks you ‘Impact on long term aim’ from Low to High. So a wish that is hard for you to do but would have maximum impact on the aim would go on the top right of the sheet. One that was middle easy with low impact would go near the bottom, in the middle.
• These axis can say what you like: how long it would take, how expensive, how many people might be involved, how original the idea is etc. It depends on what your key measures are.
• Now comes the prioritising stage. Divide the sheet in two with a line roughly through the middle. See below left. Everything below that line has less impact than everything above so take those stickies off and put them into reserve. My line is slanting to allow for a few more of the ‘easy’ ones and a few less of the ‘hard’ ones but yours could be horizontal.

• Next (above right) mark the wishes that you think are Quick and Easy (Q+E). They’re straight forward for you to do and don’t need much thinking about. Put those into the final plan where there is space!

• From what’s left choose the five or six ideas with the most impact. (See above left.) Those that are easy you can get on with but you may be left with two or three (circled above right) that are hard to do (but trust me on this, not impossible). This is where you may need some help – this is most often creative help, new ideas and smaller steps. (You could repeat the whole process with that one sticky as your starting point).
• Lastly you need to put some steps into your diary. What are you going to do when? Start off with the big key steps but you will also find that there is room for the quick and easy ideas in and around the bigger steps. Doing these will build your motivation and confidence.

You might also need help from an expert which could be a life coach like me. Get in touch if you’re in the dreaming impossible dreams department of life and want some help with a bit where you’re stuck.

And now for your comments: