The A-B-C Time Grid
The most important work is never urgent — schedule the A's before the day eats them.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 85%
Royce organizes his time into A's, B's, and C's along the axes of importance and urgency. A's are the most important but least urgent — new products, profitability, efficiencies, building systems to scale — and precisely because they're not urgent, they get pushed aside. B's are important and somewhat urgent, like hiring, and can eventually be trained into someone else. C's are urgent but unimportant, like paying bills, which you can automate or delegate. The discipline is to protect time for the A's rather than letting a day full of urgent C's convince you that you were productive.
Origin
Royce developed the grid to escape the mom-and-pop trap of working in the business instead of on it. He noticed that the tasks that would actually scale the company were never urgent, so they never happened — the ABC labeling forced him to schedule the important work before the urgent work consumed the day.
Core principles
- 01The most important tasks (A's) are the least urgent, so they get perpetually deferred.
- 02Urgency and importance are different axes and are frequently inversely related.
- 03C-tasks are urgent but unimportant — automate or delegate them.
- 04B-tasks are important and can be trained into someone else over time.
How to run it
- 1
Label every task A, B, or C
Sort tasks by importance and urgency: A = most important, least urgent; B = important and somewhat urgent; C = urgent but least important.
- 2
Automate or delegate the C's
Handle urgent-but-unimportant work like bill-paying by setting up autopay or hiring someone, so it stops consuming your attention.
Pro tip Paying bills is the archetypal C — necessary and time-sensitive, but not something the owner should personally do.
- 3
Train out the B's
For important tasks like hiring, do them yourself until you're good, then build the capability into someone else so you're freed up.
- 4
Protect time for the A's
Deliberately schedule the important, needle-moving work — new products, profitability, systems to scale — before the day's urgent items crowd it out.
Watch out The A's are the most important yet get put aside because they're never urgent — guard them or they vanish.
In the wild
Royce classifies paying bills as a C: urgent, but not important for the owner to do personally — set it on autopay. Building systems and processes to scale is an A: not urgent on any given day, but the highest-leverage work there is.
→ By protecting time for A-work, Royce built the systems that let a single-location model scale across 5,000 cities.
Common mistakes
Letting urgency masquerade as importance
Owners tell themselves they're too busy today because someone didn't show up or a fire needs putting out, and the A-work — the only thing that scales the business — gets perpetually postponed.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and operators who feel busy all day but aren't moving the business forward.
Not ideal for
Roles where nearly all work is genuinely reactive and urgency-driven by design.
From the transcript
“A's are the most important, but they're the least urgent. And then B's are kind of somewhat important, somewhat urgent. And C's are urgent, but…”
From the episode
David Royce: How to Turn a Boring Idea into a 9-Figure Business
David Royce