Eat That Frog!

When you woke up this morning, did you feel inspired and ready to take on the opportunities that awaited you or did you feel resistant to even get out of bed? It has been my experience that most people generally relate more to the latter statement than the first. But why is that? Each day we have the opportunity to move ourselves closer to exactly what we want out of life and yet we act as if we would prefer to just let our lives pass in front of us. Today, let’s talk about how to better situate yourself so that you find that energy each morning to get the most out of your day.

In a great book on time management, Brian Tracy talks about the importance of prioritizing and planning each day to allow yourself to get the most out of each day. Before we get into his advice, let me ask you this: do you have a plan when you wake up? I ask this because having a plan is the most fundamental step toward life fulfillment, yet most of us go through each day just trying to survive our to-do lists. Think about each day as if you were building a house. If you just start laying cement, putting up dry wall, and nailing pieces of work together with no thought-out plan, you will end up with a big mess. If, however, you lay out a plan for completing your project, you will know what to do and in what order to complete your task. Your day is the same way. If you leave it to chance, you will leave yourself frustrated, stressed, and without a feeling of accomplishment because all you leave yourself with is a mess of inconsistent and incomplete tasks. If you really want to take a positive step toward reaching your goals, you must put in some time to plan out your day!

We have talked before about the need to establish goals and create a plan, but the idea of the daily plan takes this to a whole new level. In Brian’s book, Eat That Frog!, he presses the importance of spending 10-15 minutes each day planning out all the things you need to get done. This could happen the night before or the morning of, as long as you take the time to think about what you need to get done. Your next task is to put those tasks in order of importance. What is the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do to get closer to your goals? This will obviously depend on what your main goals are, so if you have not figured out your goals yet, go back and establish what it is you really want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals and you have your list of prioritized tasks, all that’s left to do is to take action! That means that the FIRST thing you do each day is your most important task. This is what Brian means when he calls on you to “eat that frog”! His point is this: if you have to eat a frog (or do something that you would not normally be inclined to do), you might as well get it over with and free up your mind for the rest of the day.

The idea is to get going on those things that will have the biggest impact on helping you to reach your goals. These are usually the actions that are hardest and on which we tend to procrastinate. If you commit to completing them first, however, they will not lingering over your head all day, potentially not being completed at all. If it’s a big task, maybe you break it up into multiple 1-2 hours chunks of work that you can get to over the next week. The idea is not that you will get everything done each day, it’s that you will make positive action each day and that you will get the most important of those actions done first!

The best part about this is that when you do complete a challenging, but highly important, task in the morning, it provides momentum for the rest of the day. You feel good about yourself, your progress, and your ability to take control. All by spending only 15 minutes a day! So tonight, plan to take that 15 minutes and write out all your tasks for the next day. Put them in order from most important to least important. Then schedule time on your calendar to complete those tasks. (Hint: You may have more tasks on your list than you have time for…that’s okay! Look at those tasks that were not your top priorities and start thinking about which ones you could delegate or eliminate. We often have a series of tasks that do very little for helping us to reach our goals or could easily be done by someone else. If so, set some time in your day to delegate what is appropriate and just eliminate the rest!)

Here’s to getting more done and reaching your goals faster!