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Imagine the following scenario — you're writing down your tasks for the day, or week, using a notepad, your wonderfully organised bullet journal or your favorite to-do app. As you add those items to your list, you feel a sense of relief: you're able to brainstorm exactly what you need to do to get to where you want to be. Chores, work or college assignments, tasks related to personal projects, and even some personal to-dos — they all go in that list.
But as soon as you stop writing, you immediately face several questions: where should you start? Is there a correct way to prioritise items in a to-do list? Will tackling a certain task in the list and leaving the others behind ruin your day? Why should you prioritise those items? Shouldn't all tasks get done eventually, independently of the order you chose?
Maybe your solution for this conundrum is simply writing down categorized to-do lists - one for work related tasks, other for chores, other for personal to-dos. You'll think that if you check something off each one of those lists every single day, you'll achieved a perfectly balanced, happy life.
The thing is, that method has two problems — first of all, creating more to-do lists means you're complicating your organization system, making it more difficult to navigate and consequently, harder to implement. Secondly, we aren't able to tackle our tasks in a perfectly balanced way; you can't have equal organization systems for parts of your life that are unequal in the amount time and effort they require of you.
Maybe another solution you imagined was simply starting from the top of your to-do list. You probably think you have to get all of them done anyway, so maybe if you start from the top and going progressively down your list, will be as good as any other method.
The problem is that not all tasks are equally important — and you know that. By ignoring that fundamental principle and looking past a really relevant deadline and choosing, instead, to tackle smaller, minor chores, you'll build upon tension as that deadline will always be on your mind. Soon, you will become frantic and overwhelmed, and ready to throw your notepad out the window.
The ABCD system is here to help you with that — helping you declutter your overwhelming to-do list, get your priorities straight, and find some sense out of the chaos of your daily assignements.
The ABCD system works for anyone - for a highschool or college student, someone who works a 9-to-5 job, a stay-at-home mom, a business owner, etc. It's a universal method that's almost ridiculously simple to use, but, when implemented, will probably become one of the staples of your time management system forever.
So first of all, ditch the categorized to-do lists. You need one list only, even if it has hundreds of items in it. Think of this list as your brain dump.
There are three main principles you should remember when categorizing your tasks from A to E — (1) importance; (2) consequences and (3) delegation. The way you categorize your tasks will have these three criteria in mind.
A tasks are the most important tasks. They have a lot of meaning to you, because they allow you to progress in your life, career, or personal projects. Not doing A tasks usually means you'll have to deal with bad consequences — not meeting a deadline set by your boss, or not studying all chapters before an exam. They are also tasks you aren't able to delegate.
B tasks aren't as personally important to you, but not tackling them may have negative consequences and you can't delegate them. B tasks are things like sending out tax forms, ordering groceries, working out, calling a friend or paying the bills. They don't necessarily help you get closer to your goals, but forgetting to order groceries means you'll have no food in the fridge, not paying the bills means you'll have a fine associated with that, and so forth.