I once asked a very successful female mentor of mine how she makes her decisions.

She told me that she went through an exercise where she took out a blank sheet of paper, sat for hours on end evaluating her past decisions (and how she wanted to make future decisions), to come up with her list of top 3 values in life. She shared that once she had confirmed these values and stuck to them, decision making became infinitely easier and faster.

Also, if you have determined what 3 things matter most to you and you are making decisions based on these criteria, you will also feel better about the decision. External factors and other people’s opinions will not be able to easily sway your decisions.

Sounds like a dream doesn’t it?

Having my doubts, I decided one Saturday afternoon, 6 years ago, to try it out. Here are some things I wrote on the sheet of paper: career, friends, family, health, fitness, nonprofits, volunteering, travel, reading, eating, time with family, time by myself, shopping, mental health, yoga, etc. Some of these things fall under larger categories of course, but it was part of the initial mind dump to get everything that mattered somewhere I could see it and evaluate it.

In the end, over the course of several days, I continually thought about what mattered to me, and how the things that matter most are likely already impacting my decision-making behavior. So I reflected on decisions I had made in the past where I felt good, confident, sure, about what I had chosen. I thought of what my options were at the time, and how my decision to prioritize one option over another back then reveals my values ranking.

I was able to narrow down to the top 3 things I value the most, and then I was also able to rank them in order of priority. It took a while to adjust to it, as sometimes I would still be troubled by ranking one over the other, not because I wasn’t sure of how I would feel about the decision, more often it was how I thought others would think about it. I knew what I wanted to choose my career over dating and getting married, but oftentimes I would get questions from friends and elders that push me in the other direction; we have ALL had this happen to us when other people’s perceptions and opinions attempt to push us away from our values (aka guilt-tripping you into a decision). The bad news is sometimes it works; you end up making a decision you don’t feel confident about, and then later on blaming others for their opinions.

News flash: You don’t need to follow anyone’s opinion of what you should do. In the words of my much younger niece: you do you.

Once I was able to fully commit to my decision making based on my top values, guess what happened? MAGIC.

I no longer spent time on things or people that didn’t align with my values. What that meant is that I freed up a lot more time to invest in things that DO matter to me. My business flourished, I was able to do work I really enjoyed, I even found a partner who could accommodate the insane amount of time I spend with my family and in the office. Side note: I shared my list of priorities with him when we first started dating, so he knew where a relationship sat on my ranking (I may also have alerted him to the fact that my list of values wasn’t changing anytime soon).

So my recommendation is to make a list and commit. Committing is always the hardest part, but the most dramatic changes you can make in your life usually arise out of the smallest things. All you have to do here is spend a few hours or days to come up with what matters to you.

Think you can do that?

Why has it been the best way for me to improve decision making?

1. You know it aligns with what’s most important to you. You’ve already ranked it, and if you truly invested time to think about this really simple top 3 ranking, there should be no more debate about in what select cases career might trump family issues (for example).

2. It sets the standard for how you operate. Your friends are able to very clearly see that I place family as my number one priority, and when faced with a decision on which one to choose, I would be able to make a decision immediately without hesitation.

3. You save a lot of time debating small and even major life decisions. On a small scale, you will find that you are spending your time on things that matter more to you. For example, should you spend the morning on a run or work extra hours in the office for that next big promotion. If your health is your top priority and your career comes in third place, the answer is simple. On a bigger scale, when would you get married and have kids? Notice I didn’t use the word ‘should’ because everyone’s standard for when it’s a good time for themselves is different. If your career comes ahead of (building your own) family, then again, you will know how to choose.

Some may think that this absolute ranking with its absolute way of decision making is too robotic, and doesn’t consider gray areas. Gray areas are where you dilly dally and waste the most time. In order for this simple ranking system and decision tool to work, it should be absolute because even though the outcome is super simple (3 values ranked on a sheet of paper), the thought process to arrive at your top priorities wasn’t.

Some people also ask: does it have to be just the top 3? If you want to have a list of your top 10 priorities that’s totally fine, but just know the more things you have on the list, you are again complicating things. This exercise is an act of simplifying your decision making, not complicating it — so stop introducing more factors to confuse yourself or to give yourself excuses to create more gray areas to deal with.

I hope this exercise will be as effective for you as it was for me. Remember that it takes time to adjust to it, but you will feel way better about every decision you make.