The world has endless tools to manage tasks, but very few that help you to think. Hopefully this tool helps more people make better decisions, with more clarity.

I created the Vibes Matrix at a moment in my life where I faced a large and complex career decision that had very different paths that would have very different life impacts. Like a lot of big life moments, I felt both excited and scared and uncomfortable all at the same time. Each path was a ball of different opportunities and risks, and I had so many conflicting feelings about these different options.

I'm a big fan of breaking large unwieldy problems into smaller more discrete problems, and I realised that I needed a way to disambiguate the complex and conflicting feelings I had about the different paths in front of me.

Vibes Matrix works by breaking down complex, confusing, or mixed emotions into distinct, identifiable elements or criteria that you can have clarity of feeling on.

I made a simple matrix in a spreadsheet and listed out all the paths I was considering, and all of the criteria I could think of that would make for an exciting or terrible decision. I then chose some emoji that represented the array of feelings I had, and gave these each a score. I then voted for each element based on how I felt, and let the results rank the overall paths ahead of me.

The results came as a total surprise. I could see my current path was comfortable but stale, and my next best option was only a touch better. My two best ranking paths were actually what I had considered to be high-risk outliers in comparison to the first two options. The Vibes Matrix helped me to see that I felt good about both the risks and the upsides of these less obvious opportunities.

I've since used the matrix for many different big life decisions, and have also shared with friends who have been faced with similar moments. The feedback has been so positive that I finally took some time to make a free online tool so more people would have access (I'm also a fan of the Whole Earth Catalog's philosophy).

Each session lives in the browser and each decision is private to the individual. A session can be encoded as a URL for saving, revisiting or sharing. Nothing is being stored anywhere beyond that. You can also export images of the matrix and vibesgram to use as you wish.