I've had a similar experience recently with trying to make sense of my life using
spreadsheets.
For instance, while I was trying to sort out my enormous TODO list, I decided to prioritize projects by assigning them scores based on a few different features. This was straight in the OS X Stickies app, but after I had more than three features/attributes, I realized it would be better done on a spreadsheet. That has been enormously useful and has really taken the stress off. I wrote about it in this post: http://noisytyping.com/quantify-your-personal-values/
It turned out that this was an established method in Operations Research, btw.
Edit: I'll note the attributes I use in my real spreadsheet (as opposed to the example in the blog post):
- Time to completion
- Time to first results
- Expected earnings
- Possible windfall
- Intrinsic fun
- Outreach
- Special commitments
- Learning new skills "opportunity benefit"
- Execution risk (misc factors)
- Familiarity
- Novelty (not mutually exclusive with Familiarity)
- Competition
- Autonomy
- Reputation building
As noted in the post, some factors can have a weight of zero. I still give them a co-efficient per project because the factor weight could change in the future.