When given two good options, how to do you pick one? Here’s how I do it.

I get caught in this trap a lot. See, I’m really good at entertaining myself. I can come up with ways to spend my time no problem, and they all seem like great things that I can justify spending time on: reading business books, mapping business ideas, researching financial products, researching anything, exercising, calling a friend, cleaning, the list goes on.

It can be tempting to think that since all of these activities are positive ways to spend time that choosing any one of them is fine.

I will admit, at times reading that book might be a great option for how to spend time, but for me, today, it was not. I had better things to do.

Is the time spent on that book today better spent on something else? How do I know? How do I assess that?

Last week I probably would have just read the book.

We all need a compass of some sort to guide us. Our ‘Moral Compass’ is a good start but what do we have beyond that?

I went through the exercise of defining some of my top values earlier this week.

• Economic Freedom
• Health
• Integrity

Would reading that book have aligned with any of those values more than some other tasks on my to-do list (such as revisiting my budget)…which clearly aligns with my top value right now? no.

Sometimes we are faced with two good decisions. I learned how to decide which ones win, and which ones get put off for another day.

I encourage you to try the exercise outlined in my previous post “Everyone needs a Filter”