Mark Twain was the first to use this phrase and the meaning behind it is to complete the most difficult task of the day first knowing that the rest of the day can only get better. I think it is an important message as most people, myself included, can often put off doing tough tasks leaving them until they are absolutely necessary creating far more time pressure and making the task more and more difficult and stressful to complete. Despite knowing that this happens when I delay doing a task for some reason I still do it. So this week I decided to make some changes.
In an older blog I touched on the fact that I can be someone that comes up with plenty of ideas but often gets carried away in the idea phase not spending enough time in the developmental and implementation phases. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is definitely because I find creating ideas fun and exciting, but the other is also because I know that trying to bring these ideas to life will be difficult and probably pretty scary. When trying to implement them I start to worry about the problems that might arise, whether the idea is good enough and if people will like it. This fear leads to procrastination and this is specifically what I have been trying to counteract.
Planning and having clear deadlines is definitely helping as there is nothing that focuses me better than having targets to work towards. However, when you break these tasks down day to day I can still be guilty of doing me least favourite task at the end of the day, but I am determined to eat the frog from now on! To do this I am making a clear plan for the tasks that need to be done each day, prioritising them accordingly and scheduling them in. This means I don’t get a chance to decide what to do and when each day, I just have to get on with it as it has already been scheduled for me. I used to be better at scheduling in this way but lack of time and probably some complacency has meant that I don’t always take the time to do it every night.
In this situation I need to take my own advice though and just spend 10 minutes a day prioritising planning ahead. I have this daily discussion with 4321 members regarding food planning and scheduling their workouts, so it is time I do the same but with my work schedule. Last week I did make a start at it and I have to say the days I managed it felt much better. My efficiency and productivity improved and, actually more than that, it had such a positive impact on my mind.
I felt I wasn’t worrying about certain tasks all day and it felt good that the most difficult tasks were behind me early on. Knowing this made my afternoon far easier! I got to just chip away at straightforward daily tasks instead of trying to rush to finish the most important task of the day before work time was over and mum time started. In fact, the only day I didn’t get to eat the frog was because Giulio and I had a meeting that meant changing our schedule and I felt under so much more pressure in the afternoon as there were tasks that I just had to get done before the end of the day and not much time left to do them.
Eating the frog is about exactly just that, dealing with the toughest task first to ease the pressure throughout the rest of the day. My plan this week is to carry on doing that and I would recommend anyone give it a go as I can guarantee it will have a positive impact on your day.
Fit Bird
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