Learn Your ABCs

“You should only adopt one habit at a time.” 
– Tim Ferriss

Have you ever created a list with everything you want to do in the next year…

And then never finished half the things on it?

You’re just like Alexa.

She’s a budding author who took 5 years to write the first draft of her first book.

Her dream of being a writer would be tough if the next draft took another 5 years….

So she read dozens of books on productivity until finding an old technique called the ‘ABCDE method’ from Brian Tracy. 

Her next 100k-word draft took five months.

Here’s how the method works…

First, you write that huge to-do list of goals.

Then you take a new page and write ‘ABCDE’ down the left-hand side of a page and categorise everything like so:

A – Goals you’d love to do

B – Goals you’d like to do

C – Goals it would be nice to do once your As and Bs are done

D – Goals you can delegate

E – Goals you can eliminate 

Take a new sheet and list all the activities you need to do to accomplish your A goals. 

And categorise them again like so: 

A – Activities you must do to achieve your goals 

B – Activities you’d like to do to achieve your goals 

C – Activities it would be nice to do once your As and Bs are done

D – Activities you can delegate

E – Activities you can eliminate 

Tke a new sheet and schedule all your A activities. 

Then implement them.

That’s the ABCDE in 6 steps:

1. Choose goals
2. Set priorities
3. Choose activities
4. Set priorities
5. Schedule
6. Implement

It’s brutal to write down your goals and then cut 90% of them out…

But see why it’s so powerful?

Alexa’s problem was not that she was lazy or lacked commitment.

She just had too many goals on her list!

I’ll bet you also have one project you’ve been thinking about for years but haven’t been able to finish yet…

So…

Time you learned your ABCs?