In his book, Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy gives us a lot of ideas about how to stop procrastinating and become more effective in our daily lives. I like the title, because we can all relate with the concept: If you had to eat a frog on a particular day, when would be the best time during the day to eat it? Many of us would wait until the last, possible moment. Tracy contends we ought to eat the frog first, because if the frog is sitting in a jar on the bottle all day, we’ll be distracted from whatever other tasks we have to do every time we look at the bottle. Knowing we have a task we don’t want to do in front of us, often keeps us from focusing on our other tasks.
For example, if you know you have to have a difficult conversation with a co-worker, when is the best time to have it? For most of us sooner is better than later, and that is Tracy’s point. After all, until we have the conversation, the task will either be in the front of our mind or in the back of it, keeping us from giving our full attention to the other matters of the day. We can have the best daily plan in the world, and if there’s a “frog to eat” on the agenda, that task will most likely grab a portion of our attention until we do it.
I need to make one key point about eating the frogs on our plates. Before we move the task to the top of our to do list, we must be sure it’s a frog that we need to eat. After all, sometimes we turn tasks that someone else ought to do into frogs that we eat. For example, let’s say a co-worker has asked you to review a project she’s working on. It’s important to her, but it has nothing to do with your area of expertise, or even interest. You want to be a good co-worker, but your plate is already full. The best thing to do in that situation is to let her eat her own frog. Saying, “No,” is often a small frog for many of us. We would rather eat someone else’s bull frog than eat the tiny frog of saying, “No.” We need to learn to eat the “no frog” in those moments when it will keep us from having to eat much larger frogs if we say, “Yes,” to tasks that we shouldn’t own.
When we have determined that the frog is ours, and it’s an important one, the bravest act of leadership is simply to open the jar and eat it. Sometimes we’re surprised to find that the frog didn’t taste as bad as we thought it would, and once it’s out of the way the rest of the day offers us the opportunity to accomplish a great deal more than we would have had we left it in the jar until the end of the day. Eat That Frog is a good read for those who need help with eliminating procrastination and gaining ideas for doing those unpleasant tasks that have to be done in order to increase our effectiveness as leaders.
Here’s to being a better leader by eating that frog–today!