What do I care about when deciding what to work on?
Info
“What to work on” is left ambiguous on purpose. I may use the word project in a very general way – it can be replaced by job, opportunities, etc.
I’m doing this as part of a quantitative way to decide on your next project or job
- Money: the most obvious one. It also includes other material benefits, like insurance, working conditions, etc. – 8/10
- Relationships: This includes both the people I get to be with in the project and out of the project. What are the relationships I get to build thanks to this project? – 9/10
- Skills: How do my current skills match this project? Will it be easy or hard for me? Do I have the skills required to do a good job? – 6/10
- Learning: How much I can learn and what experience can I obtain? How much do I value the skills I will learn with this opportunity? – 9/10
- Interestingness: How interesting do I find what I will be working on? This also could include concepts like fun, curiosity, enjoyment and passion. – 7/10
- Prospects: Does it get my foot in the door? Does it make me look better for future opportunities? Does it get me in a legible path towards something else? – 8/10
- Impact: What impact does it have in the world? Do I consider it to be positive, neutral or negative? How much impact does it have? – 5/10
- Prestige: How much recognition will you get for working on this? – 2/10
- Commitment: Related to skills - how much effort will it take to work on this? More precisely, how comfortable am I with the amount of time and energy I need to spend on this? – 3/10
- Safety: How many probabilities are there that it will go badly? Here “going badly” may depend on the project. For a job it could just mean being fired or the company going bankrupt, but for building a company it could mean losing all your money (and other people’s). – 4/10
- Autonomy: How much flexibility will I get? How much responsibility? Will I be able to own my own projects? How many decisions do I get to make? – 6/10
These items are in no particular order, and I could probably write much more extensively about each one, but that is not the focus right now.
For the next steps of deciding quantitatively, I use Google Sheets.