An excerpt from Eat That Frog!
by Brian Tracy
There's an old
saying that says..."If the first thing you do when you wake up in the
morning is eat a live frog, then nothing worse can happen for the rest of the
day!"
Brian Tracy says
that your "frog" should be the most difficult item on your things to
do list, the one you're most likely to procrastinate on; because, if you eat
that first, it'll give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day. But, if
you don't...and let him 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.
The 80/20 Rule is
one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also
called the "Pareto Principle" after its founder, the Italian
economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto noticed
that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the
"vital few", the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and
the "trivial many", the bottom 80 percent.
He later
discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle
as well. For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities
will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will
account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services
will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will
account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that
if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be
worth five or ten times or more than the other eight items put together.
Number of
Tasks versus Importance of Tasks
Here is an interesting discovery. Each of the ten tasks may take the same
amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks will contribute
five or ten times the value of any of the others.
Often, one item
on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other
nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat
first.
Focus on
Activities, Not Accomplishments
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most
complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can
be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in
the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to
be done.
Before you begin
work, always ask yourself, "Is this task in the top 20 percent of my
activities or in the bottom 80 percent?"
The hardest part
of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you
actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to
continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks
that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind
continually.
Motivate
Yourself
Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and
helps you to overcome procrastination. Time management is really life
management, personal management. It is really taking control of the sequence of
events. Time management is having control over what you do next. And you are
always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose
between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your
success in life and work.
Effective,
productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task
that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is. As
a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much
happier as a result. This should be your way of working as well.
