Eat That Frog summary
Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book.
Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment. The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.
Tracy, Brian. Eat That Frog!: Get More of the Important Things Done — Today! . Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.
If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long. The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning. You must develop the routine of “eating your frog” before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it.
Your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill.
You are designed mentally and emotionally in such a way that task completion gives you a positive feeling. It makes you happy. It makes you feel like a winner. Whenever you complete a task of any size or importance, you feel a surge of energy, enthusiasm, enthusiasm, and self-esteem. The more important the completed task, the happier, more confident, and more powerful you feel about yourself and your world.
There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to achieve it. NAPOLEON HILL
Here is a great rule for success: Think on paper. Only about 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals. These people accomplish five and ten times as much as people of equal or better education and ability but who, for whatever reason, have never taken the time to write out exactly what they want.
Step one: Decide exactly what you want. Either decide for yourself or sit down with your boss and discuss your goals and objectives until you are crystal clear about what is expected of you and in what order of priority. It is amazing how many people are working away, day after day, on low-value tasks because they have not had this critical discussion with their managers.
Step two: Write it down. Think on paper. When you write down a goal, you crystallize it and give it tangible form. You create something that you can touch and see.
Step three: Set a deadline on your goal; set subdeadlines if necessary. A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency.
Step four: Make a list of everything you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. As you think of new activities, add them to your list.
Step five: Organize the list into a plan. Organize your list by priority and sequence. List all tasks in the order they need to be done. Take a few minutes to decide what you need to do first and what you can do later. Decide what has to be done before something else and what needs to be done afterward.
Step six: Take action on your plan immediately. Do something. Do anything. An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. For you to achieve any kind of success, execution is everything. Step seven: Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal.
10/90 Rule. This rule says that the first 10 percent of time that you spend planning and organizing your work before you begin will save you as much as 90 percent of the time in getting the job done once you get started. You only have to try this rule once to prove it to yourself.
Rule: Long-term thinking improves short-term decision making.
“What are my highest-value activities?” Put another way, what are the biggest frogs that you have to eat to make the greatest contribution to your organization? To your family? To your life in general? This is one of the most important questions you can ever ask and answer. What are your highest-value activities? First, think this through for yourself.
The second question you can ask continually is, “What can I and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?” This question came from the late Peter Drucker, the management guru. It is one of the most important of all questions for achieving personal effectiveness. What can you and only you do that if done well can make a real difference?
Therefore, deliberately and consciously procrastinate on small tasks. Put off eating smaller or less ugly frogs. Eat the biggest and ugliest frogs before anything else. Do the worst first!
Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, was once asked his secret of success. He replied, “Simple. I just say no to everything that is not absolutely vital to me at the moment.” Say no to anything that is not a high-value use of your time and your life. Say no graciously but firmly to avoid agreeing to something against your will. Say it early and say it often. Remember that you have no spare time. As we say, “Your dance card is full.”
“What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?”
Perhaps the most important word in the world of work is contribution. Your rewards, both financial and emotional, will always be in direct proportion to your results, to the value of your contribution. If you want to increase your rewards, you must focus on increasing the value of what you do.
Here is an exercise that we use with our coaching clients very early in the process. We give them
a sheet of paper and then tell them, “In thirty seconds, write down your three most important goals in life right now.”
Rule: It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.
1. Identify the key skills that can help you the most to achieve better and faster results. Determine the core competencies that you will need to have in the future to lead your field. Whatever they are, set a goal, make a plan, and begin developing and increasing your ability in those
Identify your most important goal in life today. What is it? What one goal, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive effect on your life? What one career accomplishment would have the greatest positive impact on your work life?
best. You increase your self-esteem whenever you go beyond the point where the average person would normally quit.
Set deadlines and subdeadlines on every task and activity. Create your own “forcing system.” Raise the bar on yourself and don’t let yourself off the hook. Once you’ve set yourself a deadline, stick to it and even try to beat it. 2. Write out every step of a major job or project before you begin. Determine how many minutes and hours you will require to complete each phase. Then race against your own clock. Beat your own deadlines. Make it a game and resolve to win!
2. Become action oriented. A common quality of high performers is that when they hear a good idea, they take action on it immediately. Don’t delay. Try it today!
When you regularly take continuous action toward your most important goals, you activate the Momentum Principle of Success. This principle says that although it may take tremendous amounts of energy to overcome inertia and get started initially, it then takes far less energy to keep going. The good news is that the faster you move, the more energy you have. The faster you move, the more you get done and the more effective you feel. The faster you move, the more experience you get and the more you learn. The faster you move, the more competent and capable you become at your work. A sense of urgency shifts you automatically onto the fast track in your career. The faster you work and the more you get done, the higher will be your
levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. You will feel in complete control of your life and your work. Do It Now! One of the simplest and yet most powerful ways to get yourself started is to repeat the words “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!” over and over to yourself.
By concentrating single-mindedly on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50 percent or more.
The more you discipline yourself to working nonstop on a single task, the more you progress along the “efficiency curve.” You get more and more high-quality work done in less and less time. Each time you stop working, however, you break this cycle and move back along the curve to where every part of the task is more difficult and time
Elbert Hubbard defined self-discipline as “the ability to make yourself do what you should do,
when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.”
The key to happiness, satisfaction, great success, and a wonderful feeling of personal power and effectiveness is for you to develop the habit of eating your frog first thing every day when you start work.
Single handle every task: Set clear priorities, start immediately on your most important task, and then work without stopping until the job is 100 percent complete. This is the real key to high performance and maximum personal productivity.
Note: this is copy-paste from the book, not my own words. I highlighted the best parts and merged them.
