Eat That Frog

Eat That Frog! Take action! Resolve today to select the most 
important task or project that you could complete and then launch 
into it immediately. 
Once you start your most important task, discipline yourself to 
persevere without diversion or distraction until it is 100% complete. 
See it as a “test” to determine whether you are the kind of person 
who can make a decision to complete something and then carry it 
out. Once you begin, refuse to stop until the job is finished. 
 
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Putting It All Together 
The key to happiness, satisfaction, great success and a wonderful 
feeling of persona power and effectiveness is for you to develop the 
habit of eating your frog, first thing every day when you start work. 
Fortunately, this is a learnable skill that you can acquire through 
repetition. And when you develop the habit of starting on your most 
important task, before anything else, your success is assured. 
Here is a summary of the 21 Great Ways to stop procrastinating and 
get more things done faster. Review these rules and principles 
regularly until they become firmly ingrained in your thinking and 
actions and your future will be guaranteed. 
1. Set the table: Decide exactly what you want. Clarity is essential. 
Write out your goals and objectives before you begin; 
2. Plan every day in advance: Think on paper. Every minute you 
spend in planning can save you five or ten minutes in execution; 
3. Apply the 80/20 Rule to everything: Twenty percent of your 
activities will account for eighty percent of your results. Always 
concentrate your efforts on that top twenty percent; 
 
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4. Consider the consequences: Your most important tasks and 
priorities are those that can have the most serious consequences, 
positive or negative, on your life or work. Focus on these above all 
else; 
5. Practice the ABCDE Method continually: Before you begin work 
on a list of tasks, take a few moments to organize them by value 
and priority so you can be sure of working on your most 
important activities: 
6. Focus on key result areas: Identify and determine those results 
that you absolutely, positively have to get to do your job well, and 
work on them all day long; 
7. The Law of Forced Efficiency: There is never enough time to do 
everything but there is always enough time to do the most 
important things. What are they? 
8. Prepare thoroughly before you begin: Proper prior preparation 
prevents poor performance; 
9. Do your homework: The more knowledgeable and skilled you 
become at your key tasks, the faster you start them and the sooner 
you get them done; 
10. Leverage your special talents: Determine exactly what it is that 
you are very good at doing, or could be very good at, and throw 
your whole heart into doing those specific things very, very well: 
11. Identify your key constraints: Determine the bottlenecks or 
chokepoints, internally or externally, that set the speed at which 
 
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you achieve your most important goals and focus on alleviating 
them; 
12. Take it one oil barrel at a time: You can accomplish the biggest 
and most complicated job if you just complete it one step at a time; 
13. Put the pressure on yourself: Imagine that you have to leave 
town for a month and work as if you had to get all your major 
tasks completed before you left; 
14. Maximize your personal powers: Identify your periods of highest 
mental and physical energy each day and structure your most 
important and demanding tasks around these times. Get lots of 
rest so you can perform at your best; 
15. Motivate yourself into action: Be your own cheerleader. Look for 
the good in every situation. Focus on the solution rather than the 
problem. Always be optimistic and constructive; 
16. Practice creative procrastination: Since you can’t do everything, 
you must learn to deliberately put off those tasks that are of low 
value so that you have enough time to do the few things that 
really count;
17. Do the most difficult task first: Begin each day with your most 
difficult task, the one task that can make the greatest contribution 
to yourself and your work, and resolve to stay at it until it is 
complete: 
18. Slice and dice the task: Break large, complex tasks down into bite 
sized pieces and then just do one small part of the task to get 
started;