Prioritize Home Improvement Projects with Design Thinking

Home ownership can be exhausting, especially with an old house. Things are always breaking, there is a constant need for maintenance and monitoring, and it can be really difficult to stay ahead of projects that require your attention. So how might you tackle these calmly, deliberately, and with a tried and true method that dozens of companies in the Fortune 500 use regularly?  It’s called an importance/difficulty matrix, and I have been using and teaching this method for over a decade.

This method is quick, easy, and powerful.  It also happens to be pretty portable, as you can see above in the photo from my car window on our recent drive North for Thanksgiving with the fam.   

The first and most important rule when we do one of these is that we MUST MENTALLY SEPARATE the process of identifying how important something is to your ultimate goal (resale value, comfort, etc) from an evaluation of its difficulty.   

So how does it work?

Step 1.  Narrow your list of potential projects to no more than 12 projects and clarify the goal of these projects in the aggregate.  If you are selling your home, for example, this may be as simple as “getting our home ready for listing.”  If you have more than 12, talk with your partner, kids, roommates, trusted comrades, and get down to the top 12.  If you’re really stuck, call me about a “Bull’s Eye Diagram” and we’ll get you sorted. 

Step 2.  With a thick sharpie (or your favorite digital collaboration tool), write the projects down on individual sticky notes.  Remember - 1 item per sticky note. This is critical. 

Step 3. Draw a long horizontal line at the bottom of a large sheet of paper (poster size, please), wall, or table that is wide enough to fit each of your project stickies sitting next to each other in a horizontal line. 

Step 4.  Choose 1 sticky note at random, and place it in the immediate center of that horizontal line. 

Step 5.  Choose a second project sticky note and decide whether that one is more important to achieve your ultimate goal (ie: resale value) than the first one you chose or less important.  If it’s more important, put it to the right.  If it’s less important, put it to the left.  We are assessing relative impact here, so it can go immediately to the right. 

Step 6. Choose a third project sticky note and decide where it goes along the horizontal line - to the right of both you’ve placed so far? To the left of both? Or in the  middle? Feel free to slide them around, but horizontal only. You are just focusing on impact right now. Do this until you’ve slotted each of your projects, up to 12, so that you have 1 long horizontal line where the most important project is on the right and the least important project is all the way to the left.  The project all the way on the left can still be important. Remember - this is relative importance, and we are NOT YET ASSESSING DIFFICULTY.  Impact only. Difficulty comes next.

Step 7. Once you are totally done ranking these potential home projects by likely impact on your goal, draw a vertical line on the left side intersecting with the left end of your “impact” line. It should look like this 

Step 8: Choosing 1 sticky at random, slide it up or down the vertical axis but keeping the same position in the horizontal order where the hardest item is at the very top of the vertical axis and the easiest item item is at the bottom.  It doesn’t matter where your hardest project sits on the horizontal axis. Your hardest one could be all the way on the right, all the way on the left, or somewhere in the middle.  Make sure that, like the horizontal axis, each item occupies its own spot on the vertical axis. So you’ll end up with a scatter plot that looks something like this : 

Step 9:  Turn this into 4 quadrants by drawing a vertical line halfway through your items (if you have 12 items, it will be between 6 and 7 on the vertical axis) and a horizontal line halfway through your items (if you have 12 items, it will be between 6 and 7 on the horizontal axis.  

Step 10:  Label your quadrants - items in your top right are “not right now,” items in the bottom right are “quick wins.” - these are not the most important, but they’re not hard either.  Items in your bottom left are high value - they are really important and not that hard. Start there.  Top right is where you may very well have your most important items - they are really important and really hard. 

Step 11: Add any additional connections if it makes sense. Sometimes, it makes sense to tackle some of these items as a single project. Perhaps there are interdepdnecies between them, or you will have a single contractor working on multiple items in one phase. You could use color coding to clarify this.  

Step 12: Sign it, date it, and get to work!  This is an incredibly useful planning and accountability tool and I use it all the time for our house. 

Email me  if you have absolutely any questions - and thank you to my longtime colleagues at Pittsburgh’s very own LUMA Institute, now a MURAL company, for teaching me this method nearly a decade and a half ago!  We would love to help you rank, prioritize, and plan to tackle your home improvement projects with this tried and true method.  And for our seller clients, we will use this when we prepare to list your home, so get ready!