Values Card Sort: Core Values

Values Card Sort is a free app and values exercise for working out which of your personal values matter most to you right now. It uses the 83 values of the Personal Values Card Sort by W. R. Miller, J. C’de Baca, D. B. Matthews, and P. L. Wilbourne, University of New Mexico, 2001, which is in the public domain. The cards include values like Honesty, Family, Adventure, and Health.

You see one card at a time and put it in a pile, Very Important, Important, or Not Important. Then you look over your piles and move anything that landed in the wrong place. If more than ten cards end up Very Important, you narrow them to ten first. From there you choose five, put them in order, and write a little about each one, what living it looks like for you now and one small step you could take this week.

Each finished sort is saved on your device. Your top five shows on the home screen, and when you sort again, the app shows which values are still in your five, which are new, and which dropped out. It doesn’t score the change or tell you what it means. You can share any sort as a PDF or copy it as text.

You can do it on your own before a big decision, at the start of a new year, or whenever you want to see where your priorities sit. Parents, teachers, counselors, and clinicians can also use it with the people they work with, for example in acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, and in motivational interviewing.

There’s a second deck for younger people. The youth deck uses 48 values from Values Card Sort for Kids by Aria E. Fiat, PhD, adapted and used with her permission. It’s meant for an adult to go through with a child or teen, with the adult running the app. Its cards are in English in both languages.

Also in the app:
- Add a value of your own if the deck is missing one
- Short Learn pages on what values are and how to use the five you choose
- An optional reminder a week after a sort to look back at your five
- A link to print the cards if you’d rather sort them on a table
- English and Spanish, with a language switch in Settings
- A dark theme and support for larger text

No accounts, ads, or analytics, and nothing you write is sent to us. Your sorts stay on your device, or in a private folder in your own Google Drive if you turn on sync. You can also save a backup file and restore it on a new device. You can lock the app with your fingerprint, face, or screen lock, and Delete everything in Settings clears your sorts from this device, and from Drive when sync is on.

Values Card Sort is for education and personal reflection. It is not therapy or medical care, and it is not for emergencies. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition. For medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, talk with a healthcare professional. In an emergency, call 911. If you are in crisis in the United States, call or text 988.

Prefer paper? Free printable values cards, a worksheet, and a list of values are at myvaluescardsort.com.