The map is good at generating a shortlist and terrible at making a decision. Here is a sequence that plays to the first and protects you from the second.
One: narrow, do not choose
Start with what you want the next two years to be about — not who you are, which is too large a question for a Tuesday. Career, rest, people, or a clean break. Then look at which lines that puts in play, and treat the result as a longlist of somewhere between five and fifteen places.
Resist falling in love with the first name you recognise. The most common failure here is deciding, and then using every subsequent step to justify it.
Two: apply the filters with no romance in them
Visa. Money. Language. Whether you can legally work there and whether anybody will employ you. Climate, if you know yourself to be someone who does not survive January. Who you already know within an hour's travel.
This will delete most of your longlist, and it should. A line does not make a country let you in, and people who skip this step tend to find out in a consulate.
Three: read what survives
Now the astrology is worth something, because you are comparing three or four viable places rather than fantasising about forty. Look at what each one emphasises and, more usefully, what each one costs — every placement has a bill attached, and the map is at its best when it names it.
This is also the moment to notice if the survivors are all the same kind of place. If everything still standing is demanding, you have not run a comparison. You have run a mood.
Four: go, and stay longer than a holiday
Two weeks minimum, with at least one week of ordinary life inside it. Work from there. Cook something. Have an unremarkable Wednesday and notice how you feel at six in the evening with nothing planned, which is the hour that tells you most about anywhere.
Go in the bad season if you can. Everywhere is habitable in May.
The thing to hold onto
The map narrows. You decide. Anyone framing it the other way round — including us, if we ever do — is overselling a tool that works perfectly well described accurately.
And it is worth saying: not moving is a legitimate outcome of this process. Some people run the whole thing, look at the shortlist, and realise they wanted permission to stay and change something else instead. That is a good use of an afternoon.