The ABCDE method belongs to Brian Tracy. It is one of the techniques in Eat That Frog!, his 2001 book on procrastination, and he lays it out in his own words in How to Set Priorities Using the ABCDE Method on his site. Fabulous made this interactive sheet independently to practice his rule; it has no affiliation with Tracy or his company, and neither of them has endorsed it.

The whole method fits in a few lines. Write down everything you have to do today. Put a letter next to each task. Then work the list in letter order, starting with your most important A, and leave every lower letter alone while a higher one is still open.

Looking for the ABCDE model from cognitive behavioral therapy, which grew out of Albert Ellis's ABC of adversity, beliefs and consequences? That is a separate tool that only shares the letters.

What each letter means

• A, must do. A task with serious consequences if it slips, like the report your manager needs before a board meeting. When you have several, number them A-1, A-2, A-3. Tracy calls A-1 "your biggest, ugliest frog of all," which makes it the task the Eat the Frog habit tells you to tackle first.
• B, should do. A task with mild consequences. Someone may be inconvenienced if it waits, but nothing important breaks. Returning a routine call or clearing email usually lands here.
• C, nice to do. Nothing happens either way: coffee with a coworker, a personal errand squeezed into work hours.
• D, delegate. Anything someone else could do, handed off so more of your hours go to your A's.
• E, eliminate. Work that no longer needs doing at all. It leaves the list for good.

The letters only help because of the rules about order that come with them. No B while an A is left undone, no C while a B or an A is waiting, and once you start A-1, stay with it until it is finished. Tracy also asks you to letter anything new before you start on it, so the list stays the one place where the day gets decided.

How this sheet works

Write the day's tasks one line at a time, or tap a common one to add it. New lines wait at the top of the sheet with five small stamps beside them. Tap a letter and the line drops into the running order, stamped A-1, A-2, B-1 and so on. The up arrow moves a line within its letter, which is how you choose your A-1, and the sheet marks the line you should be working on now.

As the day goes, mark lines done, hand off the D's and cross off the E's. The stamp rack underneath counts each letter, and the sheet reads the mix back to you: too many A's, no D on a long list, an E still standing, a line still waiting for its letter, or a B finished while an A was open. A sheet holds twelve lines. At the end of the day, start tomorrow's sheet: unfinished lines carry over without their letters, because Tracy's practice is to letter the list fresh every day, before the work begins.

What the evidence says, and what it does not

We could find no published study that tests the ABCDE method itself. It is a practitioner's rule from a business trainer, and it is worth holding it as one.

The research around it still helps. A 2021 meta-analysis on whether time management works, by Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio, found time management moderately related to job performance, academic achievement and well-being, with a stronger pull on well-being, and life satisfaction in particular, than on performance. Those are relationships pooled across many studies of time management in general, not a trial of any one technique.

The clearest case for lettering by consequences comes from work on urgency. Across five experiments, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee found that people were more likely to pick tasks with objectively smaller payoffs over better ones when the lesser task merely looked urgent, for instance because it seemed about to expire. They named this the mere urgency effect. Asking what happens if a task never gets done pushes back against that pull, because a looming deadline alone does not earn anything an A.

The letters are only as good as your judgment, and the method will not tell you what matters; it makes you say so before the day starts deciding for you. If half your list keeps coming out as A's, treat that as news about the list, not as a failure to prioritize.

When to use it

Reach for it on days with more tasks than hours, especially when big work and small errands share one list. Letter the sheet the evening before or first thing in the morning, before your inbox does the choosing. If a single task matters today, the frog habit on its own is simpler. If you would rather commit to six ranked tasks and nothing else, try The Ivy Lee Method. And if urgent and important are easier for you to judge than consequences, the ADHD Priority Matrix sorts the same pile a different way.