Speaker 1: Throughout our day, we're constantly inundated with a variety of tasks that we have to complete, errands that we have to run, and deadlines that we have to meet. This happens so often and can seem so intense that it becomes truly overwhelming. You may have tried out listing out items on a standard to-do list, which is a great start, but it doesn't give you an effective attack plan in order to successfully prioritize and get things done. On any given day, we might be juggling to-do's ranging from replying to emails, shopping for groceries, or getting enough exercise. It can feel like we're solely striving to work our way through a checklist, without assessing whether the stuff that we are doing has any true effect on our goals or long-term plans. This is where personal development expert Brian Tracy comes in. Tracy is best known for his book Eat That Frog, a technique to stop procrastinating and get things done. But where I believe he stands out is his practical approach to prioritization, called the A-B-C-D-E method. It works like this. Grab yourself a piece of paper, and list out all the tasks that you need to complete. Once that's done, you'll need to begin assigning the letters A, B, C, D, and E to your tasks depending on their level of importance and priority. A includes items that are the most important. These bring you closer to your goals, and you cannot avoid them. There also tends to be a potentially grand downside should you not complete them. This could be work that might affect a client or your boss is asking for, and you want to try to limit this to about 3 items. List them as A1, A2, and A3 in order of priority and just get them done. It's what Brian Tracy calls the frogs in your life that you need to tackle. B includes items that you should do, but have relatively minor consequences. The rule that you should follow is that you never do a B task before all the A tasks have been completed. Generally, this tends to be items like returning phone calls or replying to emails. C tasks are those that you probably want to get done, and do not have any consequences. You don't want to leave these out, but they're generally not related to your work or your goals. So, this could be things like running errands or grabbing lunch with a friend. Next are D tasks. So, this is the category where you're hoping to delegate to someone else in order for you to focus on more important items in your A category. A good way to think about this is figuring out whether someone else could handle it with a quick explanation or whether it's technically someone else's job. This is simply about resource allocation to help you focus better. Finally, there are E tasks. An E activity should ideally be eliminated. It's a good opportunity for you to audit your tasks and identify whether you really need to do everything on your list, and whether something can be eliminated. Doing this will help you channel your energy towards consequential stuff that lies in your A and B categories. In my experience, the ABCDE method has been incredibly useful as a fix for something called productive procrastination, where we tend to get busy doing a bunch of different things as a means to procrastinate on our most important work. It's a game changer, particularly when you feel like you're always doing so much in a day but never really feel like you've accomplished anything meaningful. Make no mistake that our priorities can certainly shift. Emergencies can pop up and the importance of things can even change over time. In that case, all you need to do is revisit your list and examine whether your A tasks are truly A tasks. Having a dialed in focus on your most important tasks ultimately allows you to end your day with a greater sense of accomplishment and personal pride. The entire idea of this is to feel a little bit more in control of how you approach your to-do list. And once you gain a little more control over your productivity, well, things might just start to become a little easier. Thanks for watching. As always, drop a like on this video if you found it helpful. I believe there's a subscribe button somewhere down there alongside a notification bell, so smash that too. And I'll see you next time. Bye bye.