Prioritizing the Objective Hierarchy
Ask of your actions
Are you taking me somewhere
That I want to go?
People often think of life in terms of goals they would like to accomplish. While it is useful to think in this way, few people have fully examined their goals holistically by placing them into a hierarchy describing their constraints and primary objectives. It is a useful exercise to ask yourself, why do you take specific actions in certain situations? An objective is a statement about the universe which can be determined to be either true or false. We call an objectives constrained if it cannot be true unless another objective is true. A constraining objective is called subordinate and the constrained objective is called superior. A primary objective is one which is not subordinate to any other objective.
Can you determine the primary objectives which drive your choices and actions? It can be a difficult exercise to determine your primary objectives. In fact, you may even find yourself in a situation where sequences of constraints are circular or find that you have completely disconnected objectives which are not subordinate to any primary objectives. The proper subordination of objectives is important because it allows the individual to focus on a small set of primary objectives making self actualization easier to achieve. For example, most of us are afforded the luxury of the critical objective of existence to be subordinate to some higher sense of humanity.
A priority is a weight of importance for a particular objective in a particular moment. We can represent the relative importance of objectives using priorities which can be thought of as weights associated with each objective. Of course, people have different priorities at different times in their lives. In an extreme example, objectives related to immediate safety would be prioritized over all others if one found themselves in a dangerous situation.
People also have different priorities from each other and we can represent this by deprioritizing some priorities to zero that are associated with objectives that a particular individual does not consider important. For convenience, we can assume the priorities are weights that add up to one. Now that we have defined the timeline, objectives, and priorities we have all the pieces we need to describe the calculation behind how we evaluate our decisions and explore actualization.
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