Home My Courses Running a Household Module 3
Running a Household · Module 3 of 7 Capable

Needs, Wants, and Priorities

Not everything is equally important.

Needs and wants are different jobs

A household has to feed people. A household does not have to have a guest room ready at all times. Both take effort, but one protects life and the other protects comfort. When time, money, or energy runs short, the household that has never separated its needs from its wants discovers the difference under pressure, which is the worst time to learn it.

Priority means sequence, not value

Ranking your functions is not saying some matter and some do not. It is deciding what gets attention first when you cannot attend to everything at once. The reading below walks through how to make that call, and one rule holds above the rest: protecting people always outranks protecting things.

Priority is not about what you value. It is about what you protect first when you cannot protect everything at once.

The worksheet below loads the functions you listed in Module 1 and asks you to do two things to each: tag it as a need or a want, and move it into priority order. The result is a ranked list with the most important work at the top. That ranking becomes the spine of the rhythm you build in the next module.

Go Deeper

The reading for this module

This is the core reading for the module. Take it with your earlier work beside you.

Sort and rank your functions.

Tag each function as a need or a want, then put them in priority order. People come first.