Knowing your goals and requirements is crucial to make the right choices and conserve resources. Ask yourself this question: what do I want? Take your time and think about it for a while. It is such a basic question that defines your goals. Do you really know what you want? Let's say you want to have a motorcycle. A very cool chopper (time to play Born to Be Wild!). Maybe, you'd like to feel the wind blowing through your hair, freedom, and adrenaline. Why would you like to have this particular type of motorcycle? Maybe you're looking for something stylish and with attitude. Whatever it is, it defines you requirements.
Without understanding own goals and needs you can't really focus on what really matters to you. Anyways, let's assume that requirements are well-specified. What is the next step to get what you want? Do you directly go and get it? Sometimes. Other times it is advisable to do your homework. By that, I mean collecting data, doing research, and finding available choices and products offered on the market. Although this step seems easy and requires little thinking, there are often numerous products offered by hundreds of suppliers. Hence, handling this explosion of options makes the decision process hard.
Marketers make things even more confusing. They try to sell the good for price that is much higher that value of the actual good. You must know this feeling when someone wants to take advantage of you just because of your lack of knowledge. They do their best to sell more expensive thing even though it is not best suited for your particular needs.
Now imagine that there are tens of options available to you. Like in a grocery store, where you see tens of laundry detergents that promise to make your clothes cleaner. How to choose the best one? You should optimize the final result by comparing offers and tailoring them to the requirements. Of course, it's infeasible to compare all the offers against each other. A good rule, is to compare offers in pairs and doing that incrementally.
Without understanding own goals and needs you can't really focus on what really matters to you. Anyways, let's assume that requirements are well-specified. What is the next step to get what you want? Do you directly go and get it? Sometimes. Other times it is advisable to do your homework. By that, I mean collecting data, doing research, and finding available choices and products offered on the market. Although this step seems easy and requires little thinking, there are often numerous products offered by hundreds of suppliers. Hence, handling this explosion of options makes the decision process hard.
Marketers make things even more confusing. They try to sell the good for price that is much higher that value of the actual good. You must know this feeling when someone wants to take advantage of you just because of your lack of knowledge. They do their best to sell more expensive thing even though it is not best suited for your particular needs.
Now imagine that there are tens of options available to you. Like in a grocery store, where you see tens of laundry detergents that promise to make your clothes cleaner. How to choose the best one? You should optimize the final result by comparing offers and tailoring them to the requirements. Of course, it's infeasible to compare all the offers against each other. A good rule, is to compare offers in pairs and doing that incrementally.
Alright, that was theory, let's move to practice.
Objective: find a reasonable plan for my cell phone. Generally speaking, cell phone plans in Canada are a huge rip-off unjustified by the quality of offered services. For example, often features like caller ID (number of the person who calls you) or incoming text messages are non-free. Ridiculous!
Requirements (usage per month):
Objective: find a reasonable plan for my cell phone. Generally speaking, cell phone plans in Canada are a huge rip-off unjustified by the quality of offered services. For example, often features like caller ID (number of the person who calls you) or incoming text messages are non-free. Ridiculous!
Requirements (usage per month):
- Only pre-paid offers. I travel from time to time, so I'd rather have a couple of SIM cards, than being tied to particular providers.
- 30 minutes of local phone calls. It is more than enough, since most of the minutes are just for incoming calls. For outgoing calls I use Skype. It costs only $3 for unlimited calls to Canada and USA. Similarly, all my international calls go via Skype, so they are either free of charge or at a local rate.
- Free incoming text messages
- At least 200 outgoing messages.
- More than 200MB of data. Most of the time I've got access to the Internet over Wi-Fi. Data add-on is useful as a back-up for Skype, Maps, navigation, etc.
- Included Caller ID.
- I don't consider it reasonable to pay more than $35 for my requirements.
Collecting data: first of all, I found a list of mobile phone companies in Canada. I was truly impressed by the number of providers, since I had known only a couple of them before checking out the list. Later, I visited website of each provider and quickly screened offers of potential interest. Majority of offers was very easy to filter out, since they were absolutely senseless, e.g. offered no data for prepaid plans, there was no coverage in Kitchener-Waterloo area, or they required me to buy a phone with the SIM card! Furthermore, I also received customized offers from myCELLmyTERMS. It is funny, because some of the companies are able to satisfy my requirements, but their proposed offers weren't particularly good.
Optimization:
| Carrier | Voice | rate | Data | rate | SMS | rate | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fido | 15 min | $5 | 500MB | $25 | 250 | $5 | $35 |
| Telus | 25 min | $5 | 250MB | $20 | Unlimited | $0 | $25 |
My optimization function returns the cheapest offer that fulfills the requirements: Telus. So Telus seems like a good deal! Or the other way around: some other providers (unlisted here) tried to screw me up. It is worth noting that Fido offers day and weekly data passes, which may reduce data, and consequently, the total cost.
The above case study illustrates how the final offer satisfies the requirements and how requirements satisfy my goals. Clearly, this is a Win-win situation.
The final question is: can we generalize this decision making process to non-financial situations? I believe so. It seems to me that it can be applied to virtually any situation in life, including work, friendships, etc. Should you always conscientiously use it to make the most of life? Not necessarily. For example, when you want to have a fun night (goal), then it's best to release all expectations (no requirements), and let random good things happen (no optimization)!
The above case study illustrates how the final offer satisfies the requirements and how requirements satisfy my goals. Clearly, this is a Win-win situation.
The final question is: can we generalize this decision making process to non-financial situations? I believe so. It seems to me that it can be applied to virtually any situation in life, including work, friendships, etc. Should you always conscientiously use it to make the most of life? Not necessarily. For example, when you want to have a fun night (goal), then it's best to release all expectations (no requirements), and let random good things happen (no optimization)!
