Today I invented my very own, higher tech, and slightly more accurate 8 ball. Inspired by my career indecision I decided to create my own decision making program in excel. But it's not what you're thinking. It's not random at all. It's based on subjectively evaluating the isolated factors of a dilema, then adding them together.

First you list the factors that are important to you. For me they were things like the Intelectual Stimulation Factor, the Career Stablitity Factor, and the Character Building Factor. Then you give them points, based on how important they feel to you. Based on those points, the spread sheet then calculates the weighting of each factor. Here's how my factors turned out:

Intelectual Stimulation - 15%
Career Stability - 14.1%
Character Buildingness - 11.2%
Achieveability - 10.8%
Challenge - 10%
Speed of outcomes - 10%
Room for creativity - 10%
Social Factor - 7.4%
Longtermness - 6.6%

So there ya go. Then you switch over to sheet two. You list all your different options down the left hand column. It's important to put in a few really bad options for control. Next, you give each plan a rating out of 10 for each of the factors. It's a subjective rating of how a plan seems on a factor in light of what you know about it. Excel multiplies the ratings by their importance and kcha! Out pops a percentage of how much you like that plan.

Leading the pack at the moment is Psych Plan 3 with 71.34%. It involves doing more psychology, going overseas, and aspiring to write some kind of mass market pop psychology book on a really frivolous topic, like the psychology of Dad Jokes through out the ages.

I'm going to re-rate all the factors and all the plans every couple of days. Then, i'll graph the changes, and post them up here for your viewing pleasure.

I love it. Excel makes dilemas fun.

Excel You can download the excel file here if you want. Plug in your own decisions, and see what comes up. Becareful about some of the formulas though, they won't all just fill down as you might expect.