It is difficult to act so as to honor the value of many things at once. It produces stress and fragmentation of effort.
Listing and ranking what you value might seem like it is too involved and will lead to too long a list of values. Actually, one of the greatest benefits of this exercise is to realize the falsehood of the assumption that many things matter to you.
The first part of this realization occurs when you reach the point in your values list that you can no longer confidently rank additional items. There is no point continuing to list anything past this point, as you don’t care enough about any of those things for them to be useful in directing your choices. You may be shocked as to how quickly you reach this point.
The second part of this realization is to realize that, according to the 80/20 rule, it is likely that the first 20% of the items on your list capture 80% of the total value you find in your whole list. Furthermore, if you truncate your list to the first ten items, the first two provide 80% of the value of that set of ten.
Your surprisingly short list of values encapsulate everything you care about enough to specify where it is relative to something else, providing you with a clear ordering and a shocking amount of clarity in how to best allocate your resources to maximize what you most value.