If you’re feeling stuck with your to-do list and are not being productive, you should start eating frogs! No, we’re not crazy here. This concept and method created by Brian Tracy states that you should tackle the most difficult item on your to-do list first, the one you’re most likely to procrastinate, so that the rest of your day is free from worrying about the difficult task. Getting such a big task out of the way gives you momentum to accomplish less difficult tasks.
The funny name comes from a quote by the American writer Mark Twain. He once said that “if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long”. In other words, if the first thing you do is eat a live frog, the day can only get better from there. However, if you don’t eat it and let it sit there on the plate and stare at you while you do a hundred unimportant things, it can drain your energy and you won’t even know it.
Another interesting thing of eating that frog is that it’s not only about tackling your biggest task first, or doing the least desirable thing first, but doing that one specific task that can have the greatest impact in your life.
Brian Tracy wrote a book that’s also called Eat That Frog and he’s very famous as a motivational public speaker and self-development author. He also suggests something called the ABCDE method, which is a prioritizing technique. According to him, after writing our to-do list, we should categorize our tasks. An “A task” is your frog, something you must do and that will have serious consequences, now or in the future, in case you don’t get done. Examples: visiting a key customer, finishing the report for your boss, preparing for the afternoon presentation, attending the board meeting. If you have more than one A task, make them A1, A2, A3 in order of priority. A “B task” is something you should do, and there are mild consequences if you don’t, like returning a phone call or checking emails. A “C task” would be an activity that is nice to do, but there are no consequences in case you ignore it, like having lunch or coffee with a coworker or completing a personal errand during work break. Finally, “D tasks” are the ones you can delegate and “E tasks”, eliminate! Just cross them off and move on to something more important. By putting the ABCDE method into practice, you will feel much more productive.
Some more tips and big ideas that Tracy shares with us are:
· Practice discipline: You should never do a “B task” if there is an “A task” to be done.
· Pay attention to your C tasks. According to him, people spend 50% of their time in C tasks, and then they don’t have time or procrastinate the important ones.
· Identify your number one goal: it’s ok to have a list of goals, but being aware of that number one goal will give you the clarity to know the frogs you have to eat.
· 80/20 rule: also known as Pareto Principle, named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, this rules states that 80% of results will come from just 20% of the action. Legend has it that one day Pareto noticed that 20% of the pea plants in his garden generated 80% of the healthy pea pods. This observation caused him to think about uneven distribution in different areas. He thought about wealth and discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population. He investigated different industries and found that 80% of production typically came from just 20% of the companies. We can take Pareto’s 80/20 rule and apply it to almost any situation. Basically, have in mind that 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of your life.
· Oil barrels: one of the best ways to overcome procrastination is to get your mind off the huge task in front of you and focus on a single action that you can take. Brian Tracy gives an example of crossing the Sahara Desert. He said that many people had perished trying to cross it, because it’s just a long stretch of flat yellow sand in all directions. As a guide, the French had marked the track with black 55-gallon oil drums every five kilometers, which was exactly the distance of the horizon at that curvature of the Earth. It meant that at all times of the day you could see two barrels: the one you had just passed and the one ahead. Now all people had to do in order to get from one side to the other was to go toward to next oil barrel. This way, they were able to cross the biggest desert in the world just by “taking it one barrel at a time”. That means that, whatever you’re doing, break your huge goal down into micro goals and just take it one step at a time, keep heading toward the next oil barrel.
· Single handle stuff: start a task and finish it, and remove distractions. You don’t want to have unfinished business as a ghost chasing you.
So what is your frog today? Have you already eaten it?
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