A message from Sandy. There is an old saying……………..”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.”  (Ok it sounds gross, but you get the idea) So your “frog” should be the most difficult task on your to do list, the one you are most likely to procrastinate doing. If you do that task first, it will give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day. This lesson shows us what is vital to effective time management—- 3 D’s—-decision, discipline, and determination.

Here’s what author Brian Tracy who wrote Eat That Frog! says,  he reminds us the importance of the 80/20 Rule as one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. This principle says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results, 20% of your customers will account for 80% of your sales, 20% of your products or services will account for 80% of your profits, 20% of your tasks will account for 80% of the value of what you do. This means if you have a list of 10 items to do—2 of those items will turn out to be worth 5-10  times more than the other 8 put together.

Number of Tasks verses Importance of Tasks:

Each of the 10 tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish, but 1-2  of those tasks will contribute 5-10 times the value. Often, 1 item on your list can worth more than all the others —this task is invariably  the “frog” you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, Not Accomplishments:

The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and the most complex–but the payoff and rewards for  completing these tasks can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on the tasks in the bottom 80% while you still have tasks in the top 20% to be done.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin to work on a valuable task you will naturally be motivated to continue. A part of our mind loves to be busy working on significant things that can really make a difference. Your job now becomes to feed this part of your mind continually.

Motivate Yourself:

Just thinking about starting and finish a task may help motivate you. Time management is really life management and personal management. It is really taking control over a sequence of events, having control over what you do next. Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to “eat that frog: whatever is may be. As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person.

Your assignment, if you choose to accept it——- Eat That Frog!