Manage your goal efficiently

I have been using a time management technique suggested by Brian Tracy and it works really well. It is called the ABCDE method. The way I do it is as follows:

1. Set up a spreadsheet with four different pages. These will be long-term goals, monthly goals, weekly goals and things to do today.

2. List your long-term goals on the first page, you might want to prioritise these, but don’t worry about all the letters for this page, because these goals are all important!. Just get the goals down and in some sort of order of priority.

3. Next, work out what you need to achieve this month to be on target to meet your long-term goals. Everything you can think of, write it down. Add to this list whenever you think of something new that needs to be done.

4. Down one column, label each of the things that has to be done as an A, B, C, D or E. A-type goals are very important, and may also be urgent. These are the activities that, once completed, will change your life. For example, completing a deadline driven project, prospecting for new clients and developing a new product idea are all level A activites. B-type activities are those that may feel urgent, but are not as important. These are things like returning phonecalls and e-mails and doing errands or other small projects. C-type activities are the trivial things that we do when we procrastinate. D-type activities are things that can be delegated (be ruthless!) and E-type activities are things that you think should be eliminated from your list.
Sort your list of activities by letter and then number each A in order of priority. Do the same for the B’s and C’s. Your list should look like A1, A2, A3, B1 etc.

5. Transfer the things that need to be done this week to your “this week” page. Try to transfer over as many of the high priority A’s as possible. Again, rank this week’s tasks using the same method.

6. Finally transfer the most important items to today’s to do list and rank them in order again. Start to work on the activity of highest importance immediately!

Before I started using this method, I knew what I had to do but sometimes spent my morning doing the B and C activities rather than jumping into the important A’s. Since I have been following this method, I have made a big difference to my productivity!