Prioritizing Your Relationships – Part 7

In Part 6 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, I described Bentham’s take on utilitarianism and advocated using his seven factors as part of a method for deciding what is the globally optimal developmental choice in each moment. Doing this requires considering as many as possible of the Bentham’s utilitarian relevant factors of intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent.

Bentham balances almost everything in terms of our innate desire to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain and measures almost everything in terms of providing the greatest pleasure for the most people involved and avoiding the the most pain for the most people involved. Bentham developed his felicific calculus as an algorithm for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to cause and he based the moral rightness or wrongness of an action on the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced.

One person’s pleasure, however, may well be another person’s pain. So for Greatness! sake, let’s replace pleasure and pain with increasing your life’s net balance of resources and decreasing your life’s net balance of resources; your “life’s net balance of resources” including those of all the people, places, and things to whom and for whom your values make you responsible.

Bentham’s structure of analyzing any situation that presents itself trains us to consider, not only for one’s self, but also for all of the others involved in the situation, the following “circumstances”:

1. Intensity: How strong is the pleasure?
2. Duration: How long will the pleasure last?
3. Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the pleasure will occur?
4. Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will the pleasure occur?
5. Fecundity: The probability that the action will be followed by sensations of the same kind.
6. Purity: The probability that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind.
7. Extent: How many people will be affected?

Shifting the focus to resource management, Bentham’s list morphs into a Greatness! list of

1. Intensity becomes Resource Leverage: How much of my life’s precious resources will I and others have to invest and will this increase or decrease my and others’ net balance of life’s precious resources?
2. Duration: How long will this investment and increase or decrease of resources last?
3. Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the investment and return on resources will occur?
4. Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will one have to invest one’s resources and how soon will the return on those resources occur?
5. Fecundity: What is the probability that the investment in resources will be followed by increases in resources of the same or a different kind?
6. Purity: What is the probability that the investment of resources will result in a decrease in my and/or other’s net balance of resources?
7. Extent: How many people will be affected by the change (investment vs. return) in our life’s net  balance of resources?
8. Priority: What is the priority on my hierarchy of relationships of those people affected by this decision?

These are a lot of factors to run through for each and every opportunity to excel that presents itself, which could number in the hundreds each day. You could literally consume your entire day just trying to figure out what to do next. So, let’s poke at these eight factors a bit to internalize some of this decision making process.

First, these prioritizing factors only come in to play in two circumstances: important issues and urgent issues. An example of an important personal issue might include “Should I rightsize my body by eating less CRAPF (the “P” is silent and the acronym stands for commercially refined and processed foods) and moving my fat ass more?” or “Should I seek a spouse (or a house or get rid of one or the other or both)?” Examples of important work-related issues might include “Should we change to a computerized customer relationship management system?” or “Should I add/promote/demote/replace a particular employee?”

Obviously, these important issues require thoughtful application of the proaction, perception, and planning P’s in the P10 Principle. Equally obviously, not much prioritizing of your relationships or use of your resources is needed for deciding whether to have pumpernickel, whole wheat, or gluten-free toast with your solitary egg for breakfast.

Less obvious, however, is when less important issues pop up urgently. This is the type of “on the fly” demands on your life’s precious resources that absolutely requires prioritizing your relationships. And it takes about 600 more words to discuss it.

So, in Part 8 of this series of posts on Prioritizing Your Relationships, we will discuss my favorite example of how to do the right thing moment to moment and be Great! All the time!