> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://executivefunction.support/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Post 7: Balancing Multiple Values: Recognizing and Managing Values Complexity As You Prioritize - URL: https://executivefunction.support/post-7-balancing-multiple-values-recognizing-and-managing-values-complexity-as-you-prioritize/ - Published: 2025-07-01T01:37:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-27T01:55:30.000Z - Description: The Task-Values Anchoring Method helps you navigate competing values by mapping where they collide and choosing from four concrete ways to honor both. - Author: Mark Vigil Dombeck, PhD - Tags: series-1 #### QUICK GUIDE: BALANCING MULTIPLE VALUES ****The core question this post answers**: What do you do once you realize you have more than one value, and they don't always point in the same direction? ****In this post, you'll learn:** - Why you'll find more than one value, and why it's normal for them to pull against each other - Why an "away" move isn't always just discomfort standing outside your values, and how to check whether the discomfort itself is a value in disguise - A toward/away check that accounts for multiple values at once - How to trace any task back to the value it serves, in either direction, and why a perfectly sorted task list can still leave you cold - The Task-Values Anchoring Method: a four-step way to plot a values collision, check whether anything is actually being served, and pick from four concrete shapes a resolution can take - Why one value taking over at the expense of the others is common, not shameful, and what actually helps - A concrete practice sequence for running all of this on your own task list ****Read time**: 20-24 minutes ****Difficulty level**: Medium ****Content warning**: Includes a worked example involving parental guilt over a missed school pickup, and a brief mention of job or career change as one possible response to a recurring conflict. ****Suggested stopping point(s)**: - After "The Value Chain" — you'll understand that values conflict is normal, how toward/away works across multiple values at once, and how tasks connect back to values even when the connection takes a few links to trace. - After "The Task-Values Anchoring Method" — you'll have a complete toolkit for handling an acute collision between two values. What follows addresses a different problem: one value quietly dominating over an extended stretch of time. ****What comes next**: Post 8 introduces the Daily Aiming Ritual, a structured daily practice for putting prioritization and values, including keeping them in balance, into action on an ongoing basis. #### SUPPORT RESOURCES: IF YOU NEED THEM This post explores what happens when your values compete with each other, and what happens when one of them quietly takes over at the expense of the rest. Recognizing this in your own life, especially the parts about guilt, or about noticing you've neglected someone you love while chasing something else that also genuinely matters to you, can bring up more than expected. That recognition is useful information; it's also a signal to pace yourself. ****Two grounding options**: - Quick reset (2 min): Notice your feet on the floor. Take three longer-exhale breaths. Return when ready. - Longer grounding (5 min): 5-4-3-2-1 sensory check (name 5 things you see, 4 you can touch, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste). Notice how you're oriented in space and time. ****Most activating sections**: - "More Than One Value, and Why They Can Pull Against Each Other" - "The Task-Values Anchoring Method" (Daniel's worked example here involves guilt over a missed pickup, and briefly names that some structural tensions point toward bigger changes, including a different job) - "Keeping Multiple Values in Balance" These sections aren't meant to harm you. They're meant to give you a map. You can skip them without losing the core learning, or return to them when you're more resourced. ****If you feel flooded**: Step away. Notice your feet. Return when ready. There's no prize for pushing through activated states. That actually prevents learning. In previous posts, I introduced the concept of executive function, explored how separating planning from execution (the "Zoom Out, Zoom In Dance") can dramatically improve productivity, and examined the cognitive foundations of executive function including working memory and processing speed. From there, I discussed how to break down complex projects into manageable tasks through Task Analysis, which is akin to slicing a large loaf of bread so you can eat it one slice at a time, and walked through several frameworks for deciding which task to tackle first: the Eisenhower Matrix, the value/effort filter, dependency mapping. In the last post, I introduced laddering: a technique for climbing up from a problematic task to discover the value that gives that task meaning. I offered four tests to help you know when you've actually reached bedrock rather than remaining paused partway up without realizing it. I described bedrock values as having two flavors, intrinsic and introjected, a warm pull or a dutiful weight respectively, neither flavor less valuable or important than the other. You watched Sarah use the technique to analyze a presentation she'd been avoiding and watched her appreciate how that task was actually grounded in a value foundationally important and meaningful to her: her being someone whose word and work could always be counted on. This post picks up exactly where that last post left off. ## You Have More Than One Value In that last post, using the laddering technique to examine her unrest around her presentation, Sarah realized she valued being reliable and producing excellent work. This insight into what she valued landed with enough clarity that it would be easy for her, and for you, to conclude that she now had her answer, the one master key that would unlock everything in her life going forward. But of course it's not that simple. Though an excellent technique for identifying values, laddering is only capable of identifying one value at a time. And it turns out that most of the time you won't have just one value bearing on the task you're examining. You'll end up having several of them, each just as solid and important as the rest. Failing to appreciate this will only confuse Sarah. Watch what happens next. Sarah sits back down to keep working on the presentation. Twenty minutes in, she notices she wants to stop. Not avoidance exactly, this doesn't have the familiar dread-flavored feeling of the resistance she laddered into last time. Something closer to genuine depletion. She decides to ladder this too. *Why do you want to stop right now?* "I'm tired. I've been at this for two hours straight and my focus is going." *Why does that matter enough to stop?* "Because if I keep pushing through exhausted, I start making the kind of mistakes I'd have to fix later anyway. It stops actually being efficient." *Why does avoiding that matter to you, beyond the efficiency of it?* "Because if I never let myself rest until a task is done, I turn into someone who's risking making mistakes, running on fumes and resentful underneath it. That's not sustainable, and it's not who I want to be." *Why does that matter?* "Because I deserve care too. Not just usefulness to other people. My limits count for something, same as my word does." That's bedrock again, a different piece of it than the reliability piece. Call it self-care, or honoring her limits. And now notice the problem it creates. Sarah now has two things that genuinely matter to her, both confirmed, both real, both sitting on the table in front of her in the same afternoon: finishing a presentation she's already committed to, and not running herself into the ground to do it. Serving one, right now, in this specific moment, costs something real from the other. **It turns out Sarah has two values that bear on her completion of her presentation and they are in competition.** This is in fact normal. Psychologists who study values across cultures, most notably Shalom Schwartz, commonly see values conflict, so much so that when representing them, they lay them out in the form of a wheel-shaped structure known as a circumplex. Mapped onto the circumplex, values are placed on the edge of the wheel such that values near each other tend to reinforce one another, whereas values placed on opposite sides of the circumplex end up pulling against each other, contributing to ambivalence. Reliability and self-care aren't enemies exactly, but fully serving one, especially in a single finite afternoon, is paid for by a sacrifice on the part of the other. I'll come back to what this wheel is actually useful for a little further on, once you've seen the full shape of the problem it helps diagnose. ## A Second Check: Toward or Away Once you've found a value this way, and now that you know you'll likely find more than one, there's a second question worth asking about your tasks in light of those values. The question is this: when you look at a task connected to something you value, will you move toward that value by actually doing the task, or will you turn away from it, perhaps because doing the task means tolerating some discomfort? Before going further, one clarification is worth making, because it would be easy to hear that question and conclude that discomfort sits outside the world of values entirely, a plain obstacle you either push through or don't. That's not quite right. Sometimes the discomfort itself is a value, showing up sideways rather than as a clean, warm pull. Dread about a presentation might trace back to reliability, the value Sarah found. But it might just as easily trace back to something else: a fear that failing publicly would put you at risk of losing your place in a group that matters to you, an attachment-related value expressing itself as fear rather than desire. The way to find out which is happening is the technique you already know. Ladder the discomfort itself, the same way you'd ladder a task. Ask why the dread matters, and keep asking. Sometimes what you find underneath an avoidance is nothing solid, just habit or an unexamined worry. But sometimes you'll find a genuine value underneath the avoidance too, which means what looked like a value competing against plain pain was actually a value competing against another value, one of them simply dressed in discomfort instead of desire. This toward/away distinction comes from the ACT Matrix, a tool developed by psychologist Kevin Polk and colleagues, building on Steven Hayes's Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The matrix itself is built from two crossed dimensions, laid out as a simple grid. One dimension runs toward what you value on one end and away from something painful on the other. The other dimension separates what's happening inside you, thoughts, feelings, memories, from what other people can actually observe you doing. Put Sarah's presentation into all four quadrants and you get something like this. Inside her private experience, toward what she values, sits her wish to be someone whose word can be counted on. Inside her private experience, away from what's painful, sits her dread itself, the fear that sloppy work will mean people will think she's not competent. Out in the world, toward what she values, sits the actual sentences she types once she sits down to draft her presentation. Out in the world, away from what's painful, sits another possibility: she procrastinates, reorganizing her desk instead of working on the presentation. Doing this lets her avoid the dread for a moment, but it doesn't actually get her any closer to being the reliable person she wants to be either. What follows borrows the toward/away dimension from that matrix and extends it to a situation the standard matrix wasn't built to describe. Polk's model tracks one value against one uncomfortable inner experience at a time, and that uncomfortable experience is often left unexamined, treated simply as pain to be tolerated or avoided. Sometimes that's exactly what it is. But as I just noted, sometimes the discomfort itself, once laddered, turns out to be a value's own way of showing up. Sarah, like most people most of the time, has more than one value in the picture at once, and those values don't only compete with plain discomfort. They compete with each other, sometimes directly, and sometimes with one of them wearing discomfort as a disguise. With that structure in view, hold onto just the toward/away axis for a moment, one value at a time, the way the standard matrix does. Blocking out two hours to actually draft the presentation is a toward-move relative to reliability. Straightforward enough, on its own. But you already know Sarah doesn't have just one value in play this afternoon. She also has self-care, the value she found a few paragraphs ago when she noticed she wanted to stop working. And here's what toward and away actually look like once two values are on the table at the same time, in the exact same moment, not in two separate examples from two separate days. If Sarah keeps drafting through her exhaustion, that's a toward-move relative to reliability and, in the same breath, an away-move relative to self-care. If she closes the laptop and rests, that's a toward-move relative to self-care and an away-move relative to reliability. The labels toward and away, as applied to any given behavior, are functional descriptions. They depend entirely on which value you're asking about. There's no single correct toward-move that moves Sarah toward both of her values equally. Whichever way she goes this afternoon, she's moving toward one thing that genuinely matters to her and away from another thing that also genuinely matters to her. And there's that third possibility you saw a few paragraphs back, sitting quietly in the away, observable quadrant of the matrix. This is the possibility where Sarah moves toward neither of her values: neither working on her presentation nor resting. Instead she starts reorganizing her desk, telling herself she'll feel more settled once her workspace is in order and then she'll get to drafting, or to resting, whichever she decides. This move doesn't serve reliability, and it doesn't serve self-care either. This third state, moving away from the discomfort of the choice itself without moving toward either value, is closer to what the ACT Matrix was originally built to describe: movement away from unwanted internal experience, not toward anything at all. This is where understanding what's actually happening, values-wise, gets genuinely difficult. Let's say we see Sarah closing her laptop. What is happening? From the outside, closing her laptop to truly rest and closing her laptop to avoid the discomfort of knowing her presentation is unfinished can look identical. The difference isn't visible in the behavior. It's in what the action is actually in service of, if anything. Real rest is a toward-move relative to self-care. Avoidance is closer to the desk-reorganizing move: away from discomfort, toward nothing in particular. Hold onto this distinction. It's going to matter again later in this post, once you have a method for actually doing something about a values collision rather than just naming it. It's also worth noticing that the price of making a toward-move isn't always deprioritizing a competing value. Sometimes it's simply the discomfort itself being tolerated, with nothing else in the picture. That's the plain moving-towards-values-despite-pain axis the ACT Matrix was built to describe in the first place, before any of Sarah's other values entered the picture. You don't need to be comfortable before you're allowed to act in accordance with your values. Sarah doesn't need to stop feeling anxious about her presentation before she's allowed to sit down and draft it. She doesn't need to stop feeling guilty about pausing her writing before she's allowed to actually rest. The uncomfortable feelings and the valued actions can coexist, whichever direction she chooses. Waiting for discomfort to resolve first is often exactly what keeps a task, or real self-care, indefinitely out of reach. One more thing worth simply noticing rather than fully understanding yet: the pull toward that third, away state, away from both values and toward neither, rarely feels like a calm, reasoned choice. It often carries urgency, as though something is steering the decision before you've had a chance to weigh it. That sudden, oddly compelling need to reorganize the desk is a good example of exactly this. It doesn't feel like avoidance from the inside. It feels like a reasonable thing to do first. A wave of fatigue happening right when you'd need to start the hard thing. A thought that arrives fully formed: "I should really deal with email first." For now, just notice the quality of this urgency when it shows up, the sense that something in you that isn't quite your rational mind is doing the steering. Later in this series, I introduce parts work in [Post 13: Parts Work for Executive Function, Building Alliance Instead of Waging War](https://executivefunction.support/post-13-parts-work-for-executive-function-building-alliance-instead-of-waging-war/), the idea that different aspects of yourself want different things and need alliance rather than override, not combat. That framework is the actual foundation for working directly with the emotional parts of yourself that do this kind of steering. For now, noticing the direction of the urgent feelings, and noticing which value is being served, which is quietly being set aside, and whether any value is actually being served at all, is genuinely useful on its own. ## The Value Chain: Connecting Tasks Back to What They're Really For Laddering climbs upward, from a concrete task to why it matters and why that mattering matters, until you reach something foundational. That's the direction you already learned in the last post. The same climb works in the other direction too, from a value back down to the tasks that serve it, and learning to walk it both ways is what turns laddering from a one-time insight into something genuinely useful for ongoing prioritization. Your goals, projects, and the individual tasks that make them up don't exist in a vacuum. They emanate from your values and, in some real sense, exist to serve them. A value points toward a goal. A goal breaks into projects. Projects break into the tasks that show up on your daily list. So long as this chain stays intact, even a mundane task connects to something you've already confirmed matters to you, however indirect that connection might be. This is also the mechanism behind a gap I left open back in the prioritization post. I told you then that a well-sorted list could still leave you hollow, and promised to come back to why. Here's the answer: a well-sorted list can betray you when two of its tasks trace back to values that don't get along. The Eisenhower Matrix will happily sort a client email and an afternoon walk into two different quadrants, urgent-and-important and not-urgent-at-all, without ever asking whether the values sitting underneath those two tasks are on speaking terms with each other. You don't need a dramatic collision to see this. Reply to a client email today, and you're serving reliability, the same value Sarah found. Take an hour for a walk today, and you're serving self-care, the same value Sarah found sitting under her exhaustion. Neither task is urgent in the way a missed pickup is urgent. Neither one involves anyone else. And yet the same underlying tension is already present, quietly, in an entirely ordinary Tuesday: time spent on one is time not spent on the other, and the values underneath each one don't automatically negotiate with each other just because the tasks themselves look unremarkable on a to-do list. Here's a second, more vivid example worth seeing play out somewhere ordinary. Many people get up before dawn to work hard at demanding jobs. Ask them why, and the honest answer usually isn't that they love waking up in the dark. It's closer to this: the early mornings and hard work produce steady income, and that income lets them provide for the people who depend on them, children, an aging parent, a partner they've built a life with. Providing for the people they love connects to something more foundational still: a value around care, around love showing up as tangible support rather than just feeling. The task connects to the value through two links: the hard work serves the goal of steady income, and that goal serves the value of care. The discomfort of the early wake-up is offset by the value it serves, not eliminated by it. Nobody needs to enjoy waking up in the dark for this chain to be completely real. This matters practically in two directions. Going down the ladder, starting from a value, you can ask what goal would actually serve it, what would count as real progress in concrete terms, what project would move that goal forward, and what specific task this week would move the project forward. This is how a value stops being an abstract idea and shows up as specific tasks on your daily todo list. Going up the ladder, you're running the exact same climb you learned in the last post, just now aimed at a task already sitting on your list rather than one you sat down to examine on purpose. Take any task and ask what it's actually in service of. Sometimes the chain is short and obvious. Sometimes, like the early riser, it takes two links before you land somewhere foundational. Either way, tracing the connection deliberately is worth practicing on tasks you don't yet dread, not just the ones that have already become unbearable enough to force the question. Doing this regularly is also how you confirm that a task on your list is actually serving one of your own values, rather than quietly serving someone else's without your having noticed. Sometimes tracing a task upward reveals that what's actually driving it is a wish to avoid disappointing someone, or to stay safely attached to a relationship or group you don't want to jeopardize. That's a real value too. Security and belonging are genuine values, not character flaws. But it's the kind of value that works better examined and either affirmed or knowingly set down, rather than left running the show implicitly, never having been looked at directly. Making it explicit is itself part of what laddering is for. This, incidentally, is the same motion you'll be asked to make on your own list in the exercise waiting for you at the end of this post, where you'll ladder a second task of your own. Chain-tracing and laddering aren't two separate skills to keep straight. They're the same climb, run in whichever direction is useful, aimed at whichever task or value you're standing in front of. And sometimes, when you try to trace a task upward, nothing shows up. You climb, and the honest answer at every rung is some version of "I don't actually know why this task is on my list," or, "someone else decided this task matters to them, and as I examine it I realize it doesn't matter to me." Recognizing this is the case is actually useful information rather than evidence of failure, as it can give you permission to disengage from tasks you don't value, provided you have the freedom to do so. Sometimes life genuinely requires things of us that don't trace back to anything we'd choose ourselves. But it's worth knowing which of your tasks are like this, so you're not mistaking obligation for meaning, or meaning for obligation. 💡 **This is a natural stopping point. If you understand that you have more than one value and they can pull against each other without anything being wrong, that a plan can move toward one value while moving away from another, including when the "away" turns out to be another value in disguise, and that tasks connect back to values through goals and projects even when the connection takes a few links to trace, you have a complete and useful thought-unit. What follows gives you an actual method for handling a values collision once you've spotted one, but there's no need to continue now if you're ready to sit with what you've learned. Return when ready.* ## The Task-Values Anchoring Method You now have everything you need to notice a values collision: you know values can conflict, you know how to check whether a given move is toward one value and away from another, including when the "away" is really another value in disguise, and you know how to trace a task back to the value underneath it. What you don't have yet is a method for what to do once you've noticed a values collision. This section gives you that method, which I call the Task-Values Anchoring Method. Here it is, stated plainly, before any of the reasoning underneath it: 1. **Plot your two values on the circumplex.** Are they near neighbors, generally compatible values that just happen to be competing for the same afternoon, or are they closer to opposite sides of the wheel, values that tend to pull against each other as a matter of course? 2. **Ask the Step Zero question.** Right now, in this specific moment, is what you're doing actually serving one of the two values, or are you caught in the third state, serving neither? 3. **Pick the shape that matches the tension.** Alternate, Choose and Own It, Change the Container, or Let It Sit. Which one fits depends on what Steps 1 and 2 just told you. 4. **Concretize the shape into an actual behavioral plan.** Not "I'll alternate," but the actual when, where, and who needs to know. The rest of this section walks through each of these four steps in turn, so you have both the quick version above and the reasoning underneath it. ### Step 1: What the Circumplex Is Actually Useful For Start by actually plotting your two values on Schwartz's circumplex, the wheel-shaped map I mentioned earlier, where neighboring values tend to reinforce each other and values on opposite sides of the wheel tend to pull against each other. Here's a way I find it useful to build on top of that wheel. What follows is my own extension of Schwartz's model, not a claim he makes in his original work. Whether your two colliding values sit near each other on the wheel or on opposite sides of it tells you something practically useful about what kind of problem you're actually facing. If two values are generally compatible, near neighbors on the wheel, and they've simply collided because they competed for the same Tuesday afternoon, you're most likely looking at a one-off resource crunch. It'll probably resolve itself once this particular week is over. But if two values sit closer to opposite sides of the wheel, genuinely pulling in different directions as a matter of course, the collision you're looking at today is likely to be the first of many, not a one-time scheduling accident. That distinction matters, because it points you toward different remedies below. Resource crunches respond well to simply alternating or making a one-time deliberate choice. Standing structural tensions are the ones that keep resurfacing no matter how well you manage any single instance of them, and those are the ones that eventually call for changing the container itself. ### Step 2: Is Anything Actually Being Served Before you assume you're genuinely honoring one value at the expense of another, it's worth checking something first, because it's easy to get this wrong. Go back to Sarah's desk-reorganizing moment from a few sections ago. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside too, it can look exactly like she's choosing self-care over reliability. But she isn't. She's doing neither. She's moving away from the discomfort of having to choose at all, and toward nothing in particular. So ask yourself plainly: is what I'm doing right now actually serving one of these two values, or is it serving neither? If you're in that third state, none of the four shapes below are what you need yet. What you need is simply to notice that you're there, and step back into an actual choice, any one of the four, rather than staying in the avoidance. Even the lightest of the four shapes, the one where you decide to do nothing further, still requires you to name which two values are actually in tension. The third state doesn't require you to name anything. That's the tell, and it's also the fix: naming the two values honestly is what gets you out of it. When you do find yourself genuinely caught, serving neither value, here's a rough order for working through it. First, see if you can determine honestly whether one value should simply take priority right now. If so, sacrificing the other, at least for this instance, is the right call, and you can move straight to Choose and Own It below. Second, if no clear priority presents itself and you notice you're actually stuck, that stuckness is itself informative. It usually means the choice is being blocked by something other than the values themselves, most often plain depletion: not enough sleep, not enough food, not enough emotional reserve left to do the work of choosing well. When that's what's happening, it's often wiser to default toward the self-care side of the tension rather than trying to reason your way to a fully optimized answer on the spot. Restoring some capacity first is frequently the more urgent move, since the depletion may be part of what's keeping you stuck in the first place, and once restored you'll have more to work with when you come back to the harder choice. This default is worth deciding on ahead of time, in a calmer moment, rather than in the stuck moment itself. The same depletion that creates the paralysis also tends to eat the mental room you'd need to reason your way to this same conclusion while you're actually in it. Decide now what your default move will be the next time you notice yourself frozen between two values, so you're not inventing a plan from scratch while already running on empty. ### Step 3: Four Shapes a Resolution Can Take Once you've confirmed you're actually facing a real collision between two values, and not the third state in disguise, here are four concrete shapes an actual response can take. None of them is the correct one. Which one fits depends on the situation in front of you and what Steps 1 and 2 already told you. I'll work all four through one example, following someone I'll call Daniel. Daniel ladders a work task and finds a value around being someone with a reputation for doing good, timely work. Later, he ladders a second task, this one connected to picking up his child from school, and finds a value around being reliably present for his kid's childhood rather than a distant provider. Last Tuesday, these two collided directly: he stayed late finishing a report and arrived fifteen minutes late to pickup. Sitting with that memory now, he feels real guilt. **Alternate.** Serve one value, then the other, in sequence, and name the real cost of switching rather than pretend it's free. In Daniel's case: he leaves for pickup at the scheduled time, gets his child, comes home, and finishes the report after bedtime. The report still gets written and his child still gets picked up on time. The actual cost is having to reload the mental context of the report a second time that evening, after a full break, which takes real effort and isn't free just because both values technically got served eventually. A close variant of this shape is splitting the difference rather than fully alternating: shortening the remaining report work to the essentials, and calling ahead to let the school know pickup will be a few minutes late instead of arriving unannounced. Neither value is served completely, but neither one is abandoned either, and Daniel is choosing the compromise rather than falling into it by accident. **Choose and Own It.** Pick one value to serve this time, consciously, and say so out loud to the people it affects, rather than letting the choice happen by default. In Daniel's case: he decides the report genuinely needs to be finished today, and instead of quietly staying late and hoping it works out, he calls his partner ahead of time and asks them to do pickup, and lets his child know in advance rather than showing up late with no warning. The cost to the other value doesn't disappear. Reliability at pickup still takes a hit today. But an unconscious default becomes a conscious decision, made with enough lead time that the people affected aren't left finding out the hard way. **Change the Container.** Instead of deciding case by case, change the recurring structure that keeps producing the same collision in the first place. This one comes in a minor and a major version, and most of the time the minor version is what actually fits. Minor version, in Daniel's case: he and his partner set a standing rule that report-deadline days are automatically the partner's pickup days, removing the day-of decision entirely, before it ever becomes a Tuesday-afternoon scramble again. Major version, worth naming even though it's well beyond what a single blog post section can walk you through: if this same collision, not just this specific scheduling conflict but this same values-level tension between demanding work and available presence, keeps recurring across many different specific situations rather than settling down once the schedule is fixed, that's sometimes a signal pointing toward something larger. A different role. A different employer. A genuinely different arrangement of work and life, not just a different Tuesday. That kind of change is real, and it does happen, but it's not something this post is equipped to walk you through in a few sentences. I'm naming it here so you know it's a legitimate possibility if the pattern you're noticing is bigger than any single schedule fix can hold, not so you feel pressure to reach for it before you've tried the smaller version first. **Let It Sit.** Notice the tension, don't resolve it, and let that be enough for now. In Daniel's case: he notices the guilt, doesn't take any further action about it today, and moves on with his evening. This is not a lesser option compared to the other three. Sometimes there genuinely isn't a good move available yet, or the cost of the collision is small enough that spending more effort resolving it would cost more than the collision itself did. The one thing this shape requires, the same requirement every shape here has, is that you've actually named the two values in tension rather than avoided naming them. That's what keeps this different from the third state. Notice that each of these four shapes, worked through above, ends in an actual concrete action: a phone call made ahead of time, a standing rule set with a partner, an evening spent finishing a report after bedtime. That's Step 4\. Don't stop at naming which shape fits. Decide the actual behavior, the specific when, where, and who needs to know, before you consider the collision handled. 💡 **This is a natural stopping point. If you understand the Task-Values Anchoring Method, plotting the collision on the circumplex, checking whether anything is actually being served, and choosing and concretizing one of four shapes a resolution can take, you have a complete toolkit for handling an acute collision between two values. What follows addresses a different problem: not a single collision, but one value quietly dominating over an extended stretch of time. Return when ready.* ## Keeping Multiple Values in Balance As you become aware that multiple genuine values that are important to you can have bearing on your daily tasks, and as you become better at tracing the links between tasks and values up and down their respective ladders, a practical question comes into view. How do you keep multiple values in mind at the same time as you make prioritization decisions about your tasks? It turns out that **it is actually difficult to hold multiple conflicting values in mind at the same time**. What happens more often than not is that one value quietly takes over in a given moment, suppressing your awareness of your other values so that it doesn't occur to you to think about them. This is close to the default state for many of the people I work with, and it tends to hit neurodivergent readers especially hard. Any single moment, by its nature, only shows you whichever value currently has hold of your attention. It's only when you step back and look at your behavior across a longer stretch of time, days or weeks rather than the next twenty minutes, that the fuller picture, several real values, each taking its turn in the spotlight, becomes visible at all. In the moment itself, this often shows up as hyperfocus: a task captures your attention so completely that even the part of you that wants to stop, rest, or attend to something else can't manage to make that happen. I'll give this phenomenon a fuller neuroscientific explanation later in this series. The same gravitational pull that makes it hard to stop attending to and working on something absorbing also makes it hard to stay connected to those values that aren't currently in the spotlight. When one of your values captures your goals and tasks this thoroughly, your other values become neglected and simply stop being visible to you in that moment. It's not the case that you've abandoned them. Rather, you can't remember that they are important to you in that moment because the flexible attention you'd need to do that has become temporarily fixed in place, a frozen spotlight that isn't available to illuminate what you'd need to see. For Sarah, such hyperfocused periods might look like a stretch of weeks where reliability at work channels almost all of her motivational energy, and self-care concerns fail to trouble her, not because of any decision she made, but because her attention has settled deeply enough to hold her in place, and because no other competing concern is yet powerful enough to pull her out of that focused state. If you happen to have a nervous system that's less consistently regulated, more prone to capture by whatever feels most immediately urgent, you'll experience this kind of attentional capture more often and more intensely than will other people whose attention is more easily capable of shifting between competing priorities. These are best thought of as individual differences, different normal ways of being human, neither of which constitutes a moral failing. Instead, it's useful to think about these different capacities as trade-offs having to do with how each person's attention has been tuned. One pattern is not clearly superior to another; each style works better in different contexts. The same hyperfocused attention pattern that is so useful for sustaining deep work also makes it genuinely difficult for the same people to step back out of that focus long enough to check in on everything else that matters. Even though there are advantages to each pattern in particular contexts, it is also true that the demands of living in society tend to favor the non-hyperfocused individual's ability to function: to shift smoothly between values and to not get stuck in one at the expense of others. How can this be remedied? The fix isn't usefully going to involve fighting the dominant pull of your attention towards hyperfocus through sheer willpower. It also won't help for you to feel guilty every time you notice you've lost your balance again. A more workable strategy involves forming a habit of periodically stepping back from whatever you might be doing and deliberately reorienting yourself to the whole map, the bigger picture of what you value, not just to the one value that has currently captured your attention. It's not necessary that you abandon what you've been working on as you do this. All that is required is that you regularly and periodically take the time to widen your lens enough to enable you to see the fuller picture of what is important to you: reliability matters, and self-care matters, and whatever other values you've identified by climbing up to confirm their personal importance. Once you've regained the fuller view, even briefly, it becomes again available to help you steer your next prioritization decisions, at which point the Task-Values Anchoring Method above is there waiting for you to actually use. It can be difficult to steer yourself in this manner, and I want to be clear about that. Even as you do manage to refocus yourself toward attending to other values, you may experience the discomfort of letting go of something compelling, or of failing to do enough justice to something you aspire to do. You are not guaranteed results. However, once you recognize the problem represented by neglected values, you now know what you can do about it. Post 8 gives this reorientation a standing, regular home in your day, rather than leaving it to happen only when a collision forces the question. --- ## Practicing This Yourself This is a summation exercise. Rather than introducing anything new, it asks you to run everything you've just learned in this post, laddering a second value, the toward/away check, plotting on the circumplex, the Step Zero question, and the four shapes, on your own task list, start to finish. 1. **Ladder a second task, ideally from a different part of your life than the first.** For instance, compare a task drawn from a work domain to a task drawn from a self-care domain, or a social relationship domain. Tasks drawn from such different domains tend to surface genuine values tensions more reliably than two tasks drawn from within the same domain. 2. **Notice whether the two values you've identified are in tension.** Can you point to a situation from your own life where one of your values got ignored while you attended to the other, the way the report and the school pickup collided in the example above? If you can find a moment like that, you've located a genuine tension of the kind this post is about. If you don't sense any tension, that's fine too. Not every second value you identify will conflict with your first. 3. **If they conflict, plot them on the circumplex.** Are your two values near neighbors, generally compatible but colliding over a single stretch of time, or are they closer to opposite sides of the wheel, a tension you should expect to see again? 4. **Run the Step Zero question on a specific recent moment.** Were you genuinely serving one value or the other, or were you actually caught in the third state, moving away from the discomfort of the choice itself without moving toward either value? Naming this honestly matters more than which answer you land on. 5. **Notice the emotional flavor characteristic of each side of the conflict.** Does one of your values feel more like a warm pull toward something you want, and the other more like a dutiful weight? Neither emotional flavor is better than the other; it's simply useful information about what you're weighing against what. 6. **Pick the shape that fits, and concretize it.** Alternate, Choose and Own It, Change the Container, or Let It Sit, whichever one your answers to Steps 3 and 4 point toward, then decide the actual behavior, the specific when, where, and who needs to know, rather than stopping at naming the shape. You're not required to reach a tidy resolution. Even landing on Let It Sit, having gone through the earlier steps honestly, is real progress over not noticing the tension at all. ## Bringing It Back Down to the Ground The point of all of this, the laddering, the emotional flavor of the bedrock values, the toward and away check, the chain connecting tasks to values and values to tasks, and now the Task-Values Anchoring Method, isn't to turn every decision you make into a philosophical exercise. It's to give you a way of checking in with yourself, occasionally and honestly, on whether the several things that genuinely matter to you are all getting enough attention, and a real way of doing something about it when they aren't, rather than only a way of noticing that something is off. This is not likely an everyday exercise. Reserve doing it for those moments when something feels off, when your task prioritizations look fine on paper but you're still feeling hollow, or when you notice a specific collision like the late pickup above. You might find that you've been neglecting whole domains of your experience without realizing it. Realizing that this is happening is the first step. Having four concrete shapes to choose from is what makes the second step possible. ## Trailhead References **"An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values"** by Shalom H. Schwartz (2012) This is Schwartz's own accessible summary of the circumplex model this post builds on, freely available through Online Readings in Psychology and Culture rather than sitting behind an academic paywall. This work deepens understanding of: - Why values cluster the way they do across cultures, not just within one person's psychology - The full ten-value structure the circumplex represents, of which this post used only two - The empirical basis for why opposite-side values genuinely tend to compete, rather than this being a convenient teaching metaphor Why it matters: If Step 1 of the Task-Values Anchoring Method, plotting your two values on the wheel, feels useful to you, this is the primary source behind the wheel itself, not a secondhand description of it. --- **"The Essential Guide to the ACT Matrix"** by Kevin L. Polk, Benjamin Schoendorff, Mark Webster, and Fabian O. Olaz (2016, Context Press) This is the foundational clinical text behind the toward/away distinction this post borrowed and extended. Worth being direct about: it's written for clinicians delivering Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, so it's a deeper dive rather than an easier one. This work deepens understanding of: - The full four-quadrant matrix (inside/outside, toward/away), of which this post used only the toward/away axis - How the Matrix handles a single value set against discomfort, the simpler case this post built on before extending it to multiple competing values - The broader ACT framework the Matrix was designed to simplify Why it matters: This post adapted one axis of the Matrix for a problem it wasn't originally built to solve, multiple competing values rather than one value against discomfort. Readers who want the complete, original model will find it here. ## Continuing Your Journey You now have an appreciation that you likely have multiple values in play at any moment, all of which may bear on the tasks you choose to prioritize, a way of finding out which value a given task is actually in service of, a method for checking whether your task choices are moving you toward what matters or away from discomfort, including when that discomfort is itself a value in disguise, and a concrete way of resolving an actual collision between two values once you've spotted one, the Task-Values Anchoring Method, rather than just noticing it and moving on. This is genuinely useful on its own, and you may find yourself applying one of the four shapes to a tension you've been carrying for a while without quite knowing what to do about it. In the next post, I'll introduce a structured daily practice that gives values and prioritization reflections a regular home in your life, including room to check whether all your values are getting enough attention or whether one of them has quietly been dominating for longer than you realized. That's where we're headed next. --- **Forward to Post 8**: The Daily Aiming Ritual, where we'll build a regular daily practice around putting your priorities, and now your values, including keeping them in balance, into action. **Back to Post 6**: Discovering Your Values, where I introduced laddering and the intrinsic/introjected distinction this post builds on directly.