Making complicated decisions is an emotionally fraught process and (if you are like me) the whole thing can leave you feeling paralyzed. ChoiceMap is a new free iPhone app that helps you break down complex dilemmas into a list of priorities, rate them by how they will affect your life, and then uses an algorithm to score decisions. You can use it for everything from figuring out the future of your relationship to just deciding what to eat for dinner.
It might seem a bit strange to use your iPhone to make the kind of decisions you’d usually talk over with a friend or hash out in your head (or a journal), but there are already several apps out there intended to help you make sense of your feelings. For example, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez recently profiled Feels, which she described as “the pro/con list for the smartphone, emoticon-favoring generation.”
Both apps can help turn a mass of frazzled thoughts into cool, rational decisions, but I don’t think the two necessarily need to be seen as competitors. We all process things in different ways. For some people, seeing the emoticons Feels produces is helpful. For others, the bar graphs and percentages ChoiceMap uses to rank and rate your options are the way to go. Of course, the numbers only mean what you want them to mean, but looking at them gave me a much-needed moment of clarity on some issues that have been causing me a lot of anxiety.
Over the last week, I’ve used ChoiceMap to organize my thoughts and feelings on stuff ranging from what movie to watch next, as well as more personal issues I am too scared discreet to put on TechCrunch.
Back in May 2013, I wrote about an app called Expereal that was inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory” and helps you keep track of your emotions by rating them on a 10-point scale each day. Emotions tend to play tricks on our memories and Expereal is intended as a tool to help users keep their recollections of certain events or periods of time free from cognitive bias.
ChoiceMap’s developer Jonathan Jackson was also influenced by Kahneman’s work. In this case, ChoiceMap draws on the psychologist’s writing about decision-making. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman states that our thoughts are affected by two systems.
System 1 “is basically intuition, a black box. It’s hard to know what priorities influence our gut feelings. System 2 is slow, methodical, and conscious,” explains Jackson. “With ChoiceMap, you weigh priorities, so decisions reflect what you care about the most.”
Source From: http://techcrunch.com