So, if I was looking at four opportunities, which full-time would create earnings of £30k, £50k, £60k and £70k, I’d allocate 14%, 24%, 29% and 33% of my time respectively (total potential: £210k, eg £30k ÷ £210k = 14%). Assuming an average of 21 working days a month, that would be 3, 5, 6 and 7 days each month. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Taking the simple approach works quite well for a small number of opportunities, but if you have more things you’d like to work on, then the amounts of time allocated by this method can get impossibly small – I generally advise that if you can’t spend at least one day a week – 4 days a month – on something, then it won’t be getting enough of your attention to make a good go of it. So that means you need a way to decide which opportunities to focus on, and which to park – for now at least.

Multiple Criteria

For some years, I used a balanced scorecard, or multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM), approach to making this kind of choice.