Measuring Future Events

It is a goal of The Goo to help you stick Things together - now - but in the future too.

The ability to reason about the future depends on reasoning clearly about events that might, or might not happen, and their relative importance.

A recent O'Reilly book, "Mind Performance Hacks" suggests an interesting way of measuring the importance of something in the future. Paraphrasing loosely from the book it combines two Likert scales (1-7):

Likelihood of event happening:

Never                   Likely                          Certain
1         2         3         4         5         6         7

Importance/Impact of event

Not Important           Somewhat Important              Very Important
1         2         3         4         5         6         7

By combining the two scales you get a value out of 49 - and by doubling it a value roughly out of 100!

This simple heuristic gives you a measure of relative future importance. Why worry about something if it is never going to happen? On the other hand something may seem relatively unimportant yet it is certain to occur.

Stay tuned for how future events will find their way into the Care-o-Meter via this simple measure.