Time management: More than the check marks?

I ate a frog this week.

I’ve always been very disciplined about my To Do list.  I have one of those two-page-per-day Daytimers  and take time every night to list everything I want to get done, moving the items I didn’t get done forward and adding new ones.  My family jokes about my pride in getting check marks as I finish items.

I read a time-management book this week called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy, who quotes Mark Twain as saying if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing that’s probably the worst thing that will happen to you all day.  Your “frog,” of course, is the big task you’re most likely to put off  all day if you don’t do something about it early.

The book is a lot more than that, but each evening for the past four evenings I’ve spent a couple of extra minutes identifying my frog for the next day and putting a star next to it.  I’ve found a couple of frogs twice but, as Tracy says, “if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.”

I ate my frog three out of four days and found I was much more productive the rest of the day.  Give it a try.

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