Introduction

Eat That Frog

The technique that gives this book its title is one of the most powerful personal productivity techniques you will ever learn. In fact, if you use just this one tactic every day for the rest of your life, you will increase your productivity output by a factor of ten. This one technique alone will make reading this book pay dividends you can hardly imagine.

If you are like most students today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new tasks and responsibilities just keep rolling in, like the waves of the ocean. College admissions are the most competitive they have ever been. Good grades are necessary but not sufficient. Leadership, volunteering, and showing a well-rounded set of interests and achievements are also necessary. If college is not your goal, working part-time in your chosen field while you are in school will keep you just as busy.

I’m going to let you know a fact of life that most people do not learn until they are much older. This fact is that you will never be able to do everything you have to do. You will never be able to participate in every opportunity or activity that comes your way.

Many of the extracurricular activities you do will have an important impact on your future. They can enhance your college applications, or they may be a way for you to gain experience in a chosen job while you are still in school. You have access to a huge number of possible activities, which is both wonderful and risky. These outside activities can be the source of overwhelm for many students, resulting in time commitments and priorities that compete with your academics.

These opportunities are wonderful because they provide you with places to show your leadership abilities. They offer the chance to come up with your own ideas, manage your own projects, excel by distinguishing yourself as an athlete, team captain, musician, editor of a school publication, or volunteer—the possibilities are endless.

But those endless possibilities also pose a risk. It is easy to get sucked in to saying yes to every activity, every club, every sport until you are drowning in commitments. It is important to be intentional about the activities you choose and to make sure you are getting the most out of every commitment you make. You must be strategic: each activity should be chosen with your larger, future focused goals in mind.

The Need to Be Selective

For this reason, and perhaps more than ever before, your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success and your future than any other quality or skill you can develop.

An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but who gets very little done.

The Truth about Frogs

It has been said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at that moment.

Eventually, once you have a job, you will be able to tackle your frog first thing in the morning. However, as a student, you will usually be in class first thing in the morning and your time will be spoken for. You will have to eat your frogs according to your study schedule.

The first rule of frog eating is this: think of your frogs in the context of the time you have to study. On weekends, you can eat your frog first thing in the morning. At other times, always eat your frog at the beginning of any given study session. When you sit down to do your homework in the evening, always eat your frog first. Whenever you have a study hall, eat your frog first.

Which Frog Next?

The second rule of frog eating is this: if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.

This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.

Think of this as a test. Treat it like a personal challenge. Resist the temptation to start with the easier task. Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is what you will do immediately and what you will do later, if you do it at all.

The third rule of frog eating is this: if you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.

The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first. You must develop the routine of “eating your frog” before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it.

Take Action Immediately

Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete. It has been shown over and over that the quality of “action orientation” stands out as the most observable and consistent behavior that successful people have in common. Especially once you begin college, your ability to take action without a study hall or a parent’s reminders will be the single most impactful factor in whether you succeed in your classes. It is important to begin building these habits as soon as possible. The earlier you start, the easier maintaining these habits will be throughout your life.

A Note on Technology

I began my life with very few advantages. In fact, I didn’t even graduate high school! I eventually went on to earn my master of business administration, but my early experiences have been a powerful inspiration in my life. I have written seventy-five books, and it is important to me that each one be accessible to all people with a passion for improving themselves and their life.

Many well-funded school districts and private schools fully integrate technology into daily learning. However, in many schools across the nation, students barely have access to technology at all. It is possible that your school gives every student a laptop, but perhaps you instead do all your technology work with a computer from a laptop cart. No matter what level of access to technology you have, this book is for you.

With all this in mind, the tools in this book have been written to focus on the methodology and theory, not the manner of implementation. Two chapters deal explicitly with technology, but the majority of the tools presented here have been written such that anyone with just a pencil and piece of paper can utilize them to the fullest extent.

Nevertheless, digital tracking systems or apps can be excellent vehicles for implementing the methods in this book, and the number of tools available to students is enormous. Choosing the right tools and using them wisely is absolutely essential to increasing your productivity. The two chapters on technology offer guidance on this.

And no matter how you choose to implement the advice in this book, the most important goals remain that you take action immediately, complete 100 percent of every task you start, and take full responsibility for yourself and your aspirations. All the rest is detail.

Take Control of Your Education

Thanks to the accessibility of the internet, your education has never been more in your control. World-class educational resources can be at your fingertips in an instant. If you are struggling with math, you can log on to Khan Academy and listen to a lecture on the concept that is tripping you up. If you have questions your history textbook does not answer, you can probably find an interactive website built by the Smithsonian Institution or National Geographic Society that will help you fill in the gaps.

Many resources are available online, for free, that will help you understand more about yourself and how you learn. There are also resources that will help you learn and study more effectively. But it is up to you to find them and take advantage of them.

Up until this point in your education, your teachers and parents have been responsible for what you learn. Now it is up to you! You are in control of your own learning. You will have assignments and school curricula you are expected to complete, but there is no need to feel limited by this. You can go out and learn what you are most passionate about without asking anyone’s permission!

Visualize Yourself as You Want to Be

There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, efficient person you want to be. It consists of your thinking continually about the rewards and benefits of being an action-oriented, fast-moving, and focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets projects and assignments done quickly and well on a consistent basis.

Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior. Visualize yourself as the person you intend to be in the future. Your self-image, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. All improvements in your outer life begin with improvements on the inside, in your mental pictures.

You have a virtually unlimited ability to learn and develop new skills, habits, and abilities. When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move onto the fast track in your life and studies and step on the accelerator of your potential.

Eat that frog!