Working with the Clark Griffith Method: A Practical Field Guide
What is Dr Clark Griffith?
The name comes from a specific approach to organizing and prioritizing tasks that's been floating around productivity circles for a few years now. Dr Clark Griffith refers to a system where you categorize everything you do into four buckets based on impact and urgency, then schedule your week around those buckets rather than your inbox. The original framework traces back to some management consulting materials from the late 2010s, though it's been adapted heavily since then. There's no single canonical source you can point to and say this is it. The four categories run roughly like this: Category A is high impact and high urgency, meaning you deal with it now. Category B is high impact but not urgent, which is where most meaningful work lives but people keep postponing it. Category C is low impact and urgent, the classic "someone else's fire" bucket. Category D is low impact and low urgency, which is where most things end up if you aren't deliberate about the process. I've used this system for about three years now across a few different jobs, and it's not as clean as the marketing makes it sound. The actual implementation takes some iteration before it stops fighting you.
Getting the Dr Clark Griffith system set up
You don't need any special software for this. I started with a simple spreadsheet, then moved to a dedicated note-taking app, and eventually settled on a custom Notion template I built myself. The tool doesn't matter much. What matters is having a place where every task you own gets assigned a category before it sits in your calendar. Here's the setup process I recommend: Create four columns or sections labeled A, B, C, and D. Every Sunday evening, dump every open item from your brain, your email, your project boards, and your Slack into a single master list. Don't try to do the work yet. Just capture it. Then go through that list and assign each item to one of the four categories based on the criteria above. This takes about 20 minutes for a normal workload. If it's taking longer than that, you're probably overthinking the categorization instead of just making a call.
After categorizing, look at your B bucket first. That's the part most people skip. Your A bucket will always fill itself because you respond to other people's emergencies. Schedule at least two deep work blocks in your calendar for B items before you open your email or check Slack on Monday morning.
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The part nobody warns you about
The biggest problem I hit with the Dr Clark Griffith system is that Category B items tend to feel uncomfortable because they're important but not urgent, and your brain keeps convincing you to move them down the queue. I spent about six weeks fighting this. What finally worked for me was setting a hard rule: no Category A item gets added to my calendar unless it actually has a deadline within the next 48 hours. Everything else gets pushed to B. This cuts down the false emergency rate significantly, which means your B bucket actually gets attention instead of staying empty while your week fills with other people's priorities. Another edge case I ran into: meetings. Almost all meetings get filed under C because they're urgent but rarely high impact for your actual goals. I started rejecting or delegating any meeting that didn't have a clear agenda and a stated decision that would come out of it. This cut my weekly meeting load by about 40 percent within the first month. Some people push back, but most of the time the alternative is just an email thread that achieves the same result.
How to actually maintain it week to week
Every Friday afternoon, spend 15 minutes reviewing what happened in your A, B, C, and D buckets. Note which items slipped from B to A because you neglected them, which items you should have delegated but didn't, and which items in D you can just delete entirely. This review step is where the system actually compounds. Without it, you're just doing a weekly to-do list with fancy labels. The system also requires honest categorization. If you keep calling everything an A because that feels safer, the framework is useless. I had to literally force myself to put genuinely important long-term projects in B and defend that choice to myself when I felt anxious about it. That anxiety is normal and usually means you're doing it right.
When the Dr Clark Griffith approach falls apart
There are situations where this method struggles. If you work in a highly reactive environment like customer support, operations, or emergency services, almost everything is both urgent and not particularly impactful in the way the system defines impact. The categories collapse into each other and you end up with four buckets that all look the same. In those cases, switching to a time-blocking approach or a simpler triage system is more practical. It also doesn't scale well if your team expects you to respond to messages in real time. The system assumes you have control over your calendar, which isn't true if you're the person everyone expects to answer at 9 PM on a Tuesday. You can still use the categorization mentally, but the scheduling part breaks down.
Where to find resources
There isn't an official Dr Clark Griffith download or proprietary software. The closest thing to a starter kit is a free Notion template I've shared publicly, which includes the four-column framework with preset templates for weekly planning and the Friday review checklist. You can find it by searching for "Clark Griffith task system Notion" or looking for community discussions about it on productivity forums. There's also a free Google Sheets version floating around on GitHub if you prefer spreadsheets. The system works best when you treat it as a habit-building tool rather than a productivity hack. It takes about three weeks to stop fighting your own categorization instincts. After that point, the weekly rhythm becomes automatic and the real benefit shows up in the form of fewer end-of-week crises and more time actually spent on the work that matters to you.
