The ABC Method for Triaging a Practice Owner's Day

Once you have today’s list, go through it and put a letter against each item.

An A task is both important and genuinely time-critical. If it does not happen today, a client is affected, a deadline is missed, a person is left waiting on something they need. A report due tomorrow that still needs an hour of work is an A. A reference check for a candidate you want to make an offer to before another practice does is an A. Most days have two or three real A tasks, not ten. If everything on your list looks like an A, you have not actually prioritised, you have just felt the pressure of all of it at once, and the letters are a way to make yourself sort it rather than carry it.

A B task is important but not tied to today. It could be done tomorrow without anything breaking. The pricing review, the draft job ad, the SOP you have been meaning to write. B tasks are often the ones that matter most to the practice over time, which is exactly why they need protecting: left as Bs forever, they never happen, because there is always an A shouting louder.

A C task would move something forward or tidy something up, but the practice survives fine if it waits, and some Cs quietly turn out not to need doing at all. Filing, a nice-to-have email, reorganising a folder.

The letters are quick to assign once you have done it a few times, and the value is in the honesty they force. A list of fifteen items feels overwhelming until you letter it and find there are three As, six Bs and six Cs. The three As are the day. The rest can wait or fall away, and seeing that on paper is what lets you start the first A without the other twelve items pulling at your attention.

After the letters, number them. A1 is the most important A, A2 the next, and so on through the Bs and Cs. If you need to slot something between A2 and A3, call it A2.5.

The numbering matters because it tells you where to start and, more usefully, what to protect. A1 gets your first focused block of the day, before email and phones. You work it until it is done or you hit a natural stop, then move to A2. The goal by the end of the day is all the As done and a few of the Bs and Cs.

Give the B1 slot some thought, because that is where the practice-building work usually sits. B1 is the most important thing that is not on fire, which is often the very thing that would stop tomorrow’s fires: the systems work, the hire, the conversation with a clinician. If your Bs never get touched because the As always fill the day, that is the signal to book B1 into a protected block the way you would an A, rather than leaving it to whatever time is left over, because there is never time left over.

You have high and low points of energy through the day, driven by sleep, food, exercise and the work you have already done. Use them. Your sharp hours, usually the morning, go to the A work that needs real thought. The after-lunch slump is a good time to work through Cs: the filing, the quick calls, the low-stakes admin that does not need you at your best.

The mistake is spending your sharp hours on easy work because it feels productive, and then trying to do the hard report at four in the afternoon when you are flat. The report takes twice as long and comes out worse, and the easy work you did in the morning could have been done in the slump. Matching the task to the energy is not about working harder, it is about not wasting your best two hours on things that did not need them.

The same goes for the small gaps. Ten minutes before a meeting, the wait for a call back, the time between clients: those are for Bs and Cs that fit in a short window, a single phone call, a quick approval, one email that needed writing. Fitting the small tasks into the gaps keeps your contiguous blocks free for the work that needs them.

A practical trick is to keep a short list of “gap tasks” alongside the main list: the five or six small things that could be done in ten minutes each. Then when a gap appears, you already know what to do with it, rather than spending the ten minutes deciding and ending up scrolling instead. Phone calls are ideal gap tasks, because they are hard to do during a focused block anyway and they clear quickly.

Some weeks everything genuinely is an A, usually because several things converged: an audit, a resignation, a funding change. When that happens, the ABC method still helps, because it forces you to rank even the As against each other and admit that A5 and A6 are not really going to happen today. That is better than pretending they will and finishing the day having half-done six things.

If every week looks like this, the problem is not your prioritising, it is that you have taken on more than the practice can carry, and the weekly review is where you deal with that: dropping projects, handing work over, or accepting that this is a survival month and planning it as one.

The ABC method is deliberately simple, and that is the point. A more elaborate system, with categories and tags and scores, takes longer to maintain than it saves, and it tends to get abandoned within a month. Three letters and a number, done on paper in ninety seconds, is something you will still be doing in a year. If you want a sharper view of which work matters over the longer run, high-value versus high-leverage covers that, and it works alongside the ABC triage rather than replacing it.

Tomorrow, letter and number your list before you start, and give A1 your first hour. The Practice Health Check will help you see which of your recurring Bs should be getting protected time. The ABC method is one of the tools behind a practice that stops running you, alongside running your whole practice from one to-do list and the daily rewrite habit.