Don’t Eat That Frog First

In his bestselling book, Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy tackles the issue of personal productivity with 21 ways to conquer procrastination, beginning with his classic breakfast recipe :

If the first thing you do when you wake up each morning is eat a live frog, nothing worse can happen the rest of the day!

If you’ve ever met Brian, read one of his books or heard him speak, you know what a disciplined, talented, savvy communicator – and person – he is. I have a lot of admiration for him. Better to listen to him than me! I’ve been known to procrastinate at times.

But I would humbly suggest that there are some days you will get more done by foregoing the frog for breakfast – it tastes nothing like chicken – and enjoying your Cheerios, oatmeal or bacon and eggs.

Another great author and communicator, Dave Ramsey, counsels his listeners and readers that the best way to get out of debt is the snowball method:

You should pay off the smallest debt first to create the greatest momentum in your debt snowball. The math seems to lean more toward paying the highest interest debts first, but what I have learned is that personal finance is 20% head knowledge and 80% behavior. You need some quick wins in order to stay pumped enough to get out of debt completely.

Tracy and Ramsey are obviously addressing two different topics but both are giving advise on how to get unstuck in life and get something important done.

I am a slow starter so I have personally found the snowball method more beneficial than eating the frog. But at the end of most days we are going to have to tackle a task that is not to our liking. Both methods should be part of our arsenal on personal productivity.

In the classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey reminds us that whether we start with big or small tasks, we need to organize our life around what matters most to us – we need to prioritize.

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”

If we haven’t determined what we really want to accomplish in life, it doesn’t matter if we eat the frog or start rolling a snowball.

So where do we start?

Listen to the prolific Stephen King when he says, “amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

But don’t forget the sage counsel of David Thoreau: “It is not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?”

And then let Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth put it all in perspective: “To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.”

Okay … maybe I will have that live frog for breakfast … even if it doesn’t taste even a bit like chicken.

Mark Gilroy is a veteran publisher and author of the bestselling Kristen Conner Mystery Series.