If you’re like me, you’re faced with a large number of tasks. How do you decide which to do and in which order? I propose leveraging the following equation: TV=P(g)*V(g). That’s basically a reimplementation of the expected value function, but geared towards calculating the value of tasks. TV is the task value, P(g) is the probability of the task achieving a goal and V(g) is the value of that goal.

Using this equation, you can quickly calculate the TV, or Task Value of each of the several potential tasks at hand and then decide which to do and in which order. The idea being that you should do them in order of highest to lowest TV. (Tasks may have costs, too, such as the amount of your time and effort they take to complete, but we’ll forget about that for now.)

So if you can put time into something that has a nearly certain chance of producing $5, that would be a PV of 1* $5 = $5. If you also have a task that has a 50/50 shot of generating $100, that would be a PV of .5*$100 = $50. So this logic would suggest you do the second task first. (You may also want to consider timliness, i.e. if the window to do one task expires before the window to do another, but this analysis assumes comparison of tasks that all have the same time window.)

So there you have it. And since I probably won’t make any money from this blog, I’m off to another task!