Eat That Frog!
Brian Tracy
Eat That Frog! is Brian Tracy's short book of twenty-one rules for beating procrastination, built around one: identify the most important task of the day, the one you are most likely to put off, and do it first thing, before email and before anything easier. Around it he adds planning tomorrow's list tonight, the 80/20 rule for finding the frog, and preparing the desk so the morning starts without a decision.
The days you avoid the big thing, you fill with small things and end tired and behind. Tracy's book is one rule about order, repeated twenty-one ways, and for most people one rule is the difference.
The book in essence
Tracy borrows the image from a line usually attributed to Mark Twain: if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, nothing worse can happen to you the rest of the day. The frog is the most important task, the one with the largest consequences and the strongest pull to postpone. The rule is to eat it first, when willpower and clarity are highest, and to end the negotiation before the day's two hundred smaller tasks offer themselves as alternatives. The rest of the book is support for that rule: write tomorrow's list tonight so the morning begins with an instruction; use the 80/20 rule, since twenty percent of tasks produce eighty percent of the value and the frog is in that twenty; prepare the desk; single-handle each task to completion; and treat the first hour of the day as sacred.
Published in 2001 and updated twice since, the book is deliberately brief, closer to a card of rules than an argument, and it has sold in the millions in more than forty languages, Turkish among them.
Who it's for
- Anyone whose day fills with small tasks while the important one waits
- Readers who want one rule they can apply tomorrow morning
- Managers and freelancers who start the day in the inbox
Who it's not for
- — Readers wanting to understand why they procrastinate; Tracy prescribes, Fiore explains
- — Anyone irritated by repetition; twenty-one rules restate about five ideas
Key lessons
01
Eat the frog first
The frog is the most important task and the one you most want to postpone. Do it before email, before meeting prep, before the twenty small tasks that feel like progress. Willpower is highest in the first hours; spending it on trivia spends the day's best fuel on the least important journey, and doing the frog first ends the negotiation before it starts.
An accountant in Bursa lets the demanding client's quarterly filing slide to the last two days every quarter. The Tuesday it is the first thing on his desk at eight-thirty, before the inbox, it takes two hours instead of two days.
02
Plan tomorrow tonight
Deciding what to do is itself work, and a morning that begins with a decision begins with an opportunity to avoid. Write tomorrow's list tonight, mark the frog and the next one or two, and let the morning start with an instruction from last night's calmer self.
A product manager in Istanbul writes the next day's list at six every evening and marks the frog. Her mornings, which used to start with forty minutes of email, start with the roadmap document.
03
Find the frog with 80/20
Twenty percent of tasks produce eighty percent of the value. The frog is almost always in that twenty percent, which is why it is frightening and why it matters. Ask which task, done today, would make the biggest difference; that is the one you were about to avoid.
A freelance translator lists his week and finds that one book translation is worth more than every advertising job combined. The book becomes the daily frog; the advertising fits around it.
Try this today
Tonight, write tomorrow's list and mark the single most important task as the frog; tomorrow, start it before you open email or anything easier.
Quick check
What is the frog?
Why plan tomorrow tonight?
Selected quotes
“If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.”
“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 than any other quality or skill you can develop.”