Lessons from Eating Frogs

By Robert Janelle

Mark Twain once said that if you woke up every morning and ate a live frog, it’d probably be the worst thing you’d do all day.

Consultant Brian Tracy used this quote to thread his anti-procrastination guide Eat That Frog, which I read through while procrastinating on a big feature article.

While Tracy’s book is more aimed at corporate workers (and I’ll never understand how reading the newspaper became one of the deadliest sins according to almost all productivity guides) procrastination certainly affects freelancers, hence I will share some of the lessons I learned.

Plan in Advance
Tracy writes that one of the biggest reasons for procrastinating is not being certain as to what you’re supposed to be doing. Throughout the book, he hammers home the value of advance planning.

I put this into practice quickly the night before I REALLY needed to start getting interviews scheduled by making a list of the people I needed to call and also made sure their phone numbers were on the list, which eliminated any excuse for not waking up and making calls immediately.

However, Tracy goes far more in-depth, writing that advance planning doesn’t just apply to starting a project, but other necessary tasks and even long-term goal setting.

One Piece at a Time
As I sat down to make a plan of attack on my first full-length feature in quite some time, figuring out where to begin was the biggest challenge. Fortunately, I already had an outline prepared and broke it down into small tasks based on what each of the people I wanted to interview would contribute to the story.

Tracy describes this as cutting a big, ugly frog into smaller pieces. Not the most appetizing image, but it works. Almost any major project is going to have smaller sub-projects, so focus on each sub-project before worrying too much about the whole. It’s a lot less scary, which leads to less procrastinating.

Prioritize
Pretty much every piece of task management software in existence offers a way to prioritize tasks, either by colour coding or some other method.
To deal with procrastination, Tracy recommends a combination of prioritizing tasks and discipline.

Essentially, tasks that are the highest priority must be done before you do anything of a lower priority, then move down the to-do list to the next level of priority until you’re onto the stuff that doesn’t matter much (referred to throughout the book as the “tadpoles.”)

Of course, then we get to my biggest problem. I like making lists, breaking them down in smaller sub-task lists and then tagging everything with priorities, but then it tends to become another way of procrastinating (sorta like how I read Tracy’s book while I should have been scheduling meetings) so maybe the best thing to do is just pick up the frog, open wide and swallow.