Time Management - Marc Mancini

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Time Management
The ABC System
Preached by virtually every time management expert (especially
time guru Alan Lakein) and practiced by more organizationsensitive
people than any other method, the ABC system is the
“grandfather” of prioritizing strategies. In a nutshell, it says that
all tasks can—and should—be given an A, B, C value:
• A tasks are those that must be done, and soon. When
accomplished, A tasks may yield extraordinary results.
Left undone, they may generate serious, unpleasant, or
disastrous consequences. Immediacy is what an A priority
is all about.
• B tasks are those that should be done soon. Not as pressing
as A tasks, they’re still important. They can be postponed,
but not for too long. Within a brief time, though,
they can easily rise to A status.
• C tasks are those that can be put off without creating dire
consequences. Some can linger in this category almost
indefinitely. Others—especially those tied to a distant
completion date—will eventually rise to A or B levels as
the deadline approaches.
Huh?
Perhaps the manager who
wrote the following memo
might like to rethink his or her priorities:“Doing
it right is no excuse for
not meeting the schedule.”
There’s one additional
category that you might
like to use, if you feel that
three are really not sufficient
to cover all your
bases:
• D tasks are those that, theoretically, don’t even need to be
done. They’re rarely anchored to deadlines. They would
be nice to accomplish but—realistically—could be totally
ignored, with no obvious adverse or severe effects.
Strangely, though, when you attend to them (often when
you have nothing better to do), they can yield surprising
benefits. A few examples: reading an old magazine that
turns out to contain a valuable article, buying a new read-