Eat That Frog! Full Book Review

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In our workplace, each day we meet with various tasks of different complexities and deadlines. How do we allocate time for these tasks? Time management guru, Brian Tracy, shares the idea of eating the ugliest frog first, which is to tackle the toughest, most important task first.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time.

Here’s a common challenge we all face at work: There are two very urgent and difficult tasks in front of you, how should you choose? A newcomer in the workplace would usually get themselves in a knot while working on two tasks at the same time. But this is not very efficient. When doing one task, you worry about the progress of the other one. As a result, you can do neither tasks well. So, what is the correct approach? It is very simple. To complete both tasks quickly, you have to deal with the more difficult and arduous task first, complete it and then do the other.

But there aren’t always just two urgent tasks at your work each day. You may arrive at work in the morning and have multiple tasks to be done, each with different urgency. Then how do you choose? Time management guru Brian Tracy offers us a tip: eat the ugliest frog first.

What does it mean? Here, the frog is the most difficult and important task for you. "Eating this frog" is to complete the most important and difficult task. As American writer Mark Twain once said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” If there are two, eat the uglier one first.

This rule of eating the ugly frog first doesn’t match the daily work habits of many people. Think back to when you arrived at your office in the morning, would you choose to complete the simple tasks first? Then, when you are ready to solve difficult tasks, psychological fear and resistance may lead you to play with your phone and relax. If some trivial tasks are temporarily added, such as sending emails and reimbursing expenses, then "eating this frog" will become a drag. Most people find it difficult to resist the temptation of doing first the easy then the difficult. After all, you can get obvious results by completing simple tasks first. But doing so will neither improve work efficiency, nor performance, because you can easily drag important and difficult tasks to the last minute and end up having to hastily complete them. In the bookey of Deep Work, we also analyzed other disadvantage of such a choice. Feel free to listen to it. As a result, if you want to use time more efficiently, improve work efficiency and performance, you must learn to eat that frog.