When we stop growing we die.  I like the saying, “When you are green you are growing, when you are ripe you are rotting.”  Or as Tracy quotes Pat Riley, “Anytime you stop striving to get better, you are bound to get worse.”  If we stop growing personally and/or professionally, we stagnate and start to rot.  These blogs are intended for all of us to grow (including and especially me) so that we can become better human beings and pertaining to this blog series more efficient, motivated, productive, and contributing human beings.

Procrastinators work by having someone impose deadlines for them.  Leaders impose their own imaginary deadlines to get things done.  They have internal clocks that pressure them to perform.  They must accomplish something by a certain date not because they were told that it was due on that date but because they feel they need it done by that date.  How do you work?  Do you work until the last second something is due or do you create your own internal due dates that follow a consistent rhythm?  When people say, “Oh, I work well with deadlines,” they are in fact declaring themselves procrastinators.

When the pessimist encounters a problem, he sees a roadblock.  An optimist sees an opportunity for learning from his/her mistake.  I like the saying that I heard from a  friend of mine, “We can only grow from our trials and tribulations.  Without them, we don’t grow.”  That is a truism.  It is how I live my life.  Of course, I am not always perfectly optimistic about every downturn but I am certainly improving by seeing negative experiences as actually being quite fruitful.  As Viktor Frankl said, when all freedoms are taken from you your last freedom is attitude.  Our attitude truly defines our core.  When we have a good self image, self esteem, positive outlook, then almost nothing is impossible.

If we are not in the best physical shape, lack sleep, drink too much alcohol, work late, etc., we are not going to be our best and we simply can’t perform.  Picture yourself as a professional athlete training to be at the top of your game.  We all can work to make sure that we meet these rigid goals so that we can perform in our personal and professional lives so much better.

I hope you will continue this journey with me of self improvement and ongoing maturation so that we can become better people to serve ourselves and others that much better.  I hope you can incorporate the many wonderful things Brian Tracy has taught in Eat That Frog! as I have.

How do we accomplish that?  Well, first we need to clear the space in front of us and make sure everything is well organized for us to start work.  Too often we have a cluttered work space or no work space at all.  We are sitting right in the middle of office traffic so that we are prone to mindless conversations at work that only serve to undermine our productivity.  Even a few interruptions can be enough to create a stoppage of work flow that can significantly undermine work efficiency.  As we discussed, planning is everything.  Having the right work space is one of the first steps in planning.  However, if planning stalls progress, the other admonition of just starting should be recalled:  a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  Take that step.

The next Law of Three is to have you find your three life goals.  You should be able to define those goals and write them down in less than 30 seconds.  Tracy argues that individuals who are given several hours to think of an answer tend to score the same as those who wrote their answers down in seconds.  That is due to the fact that our subconscious mind drives us to what we really want and peels away all the layers that cover the truth of what we really want.  Most individuals define their three goals based on professional, personal, and health.  Interestingly, those are the three types of goals that I set out for myself for my EO forum group in which I have monthly action steps for a larger goal that occupies my 2009 calendar year.

What are your three work strengths?  What are your three life goals?

He outlines a method that we can use as we “think on paper” called the ABCDE method of power priority.  It is as follows:

A- The most important things that you must do belong in this category.  After putting these items in this box, subdivide them into A-1, A-2, A-3, etc. based on the most to the least important of the very important things you need to do.

B- Things that you should do but are not as important as A tasks.  These B tasks are still important but they do not hold a candle to the A tasks.  Your job is to figure out what is an A and what is a B and ensure that you complete the A task before starting the B task.

C- Things that are nice to do like have coffee with your friend, etc., that would not have serious future consequences but that you enjoy doing.  C tasks naturally should follow the completion of A and B tasks.

D- The mnemonic is Delegate.  These are things that you do every day but if you are in a position of authority can in turn delegate to someone else so that you can focus in your strength zone on the A tasks.

E- Again, a good mnemonic is Eliminate.  These are things that you are doing that you really should remove from your life because they are non-productive and interfere with your life’s goals.  An example given was a person was playing 3 to 4 rounds of golf every week to the point that his family and work life were entirely suffering.  He did not have to eliminate golf but he had to seriously control the amount of time he was spending that led to a disastrous personal and professional life.

We must focus on what priority tasks we can accomplish that will permit future success for us.  The simple question that we can ask is “What consequence will the task that I am working on hold for me in the future?”  If the answer is none, then perhaps we must reconsider how important it is for us to be working on it.  Tracy talks about the “Law of Forced Efficiency”, which says that there is only a limited time that we have to accomplish anything.  We can’t eat every tadpole so we must focus on what we can accomplish that has priority value based on “future orientation” (what impact that action would have for us in the future) and “priority focus” (what value that action would have so that we can prioritize it appropriately).

He says that those who say that they work well with deadlines are not actually telling themselves the truth.  Studies have shown that people who work under pressure to deliver with a deadline are only procrastinators.  It is always much better to plan forward than to be a victim of external constraints like deadlines.

Tracy says that we should ask three important questions for maximum productivity:

1.  What are my highest value activities?

2. What can I and only I do that if done well will make a real difference?

3. What is the most valuable use of time right now?

By focusing on “future orientation”,we can help prioritize our biggest frogs and accomplish only what we need to accomplish and delegate or ignore the rest.

The idea is that on our top ten list of things, the #1 “frog” can often be substantially more important to accomplish than the other 9 all added together.  But what do we work on instead?  The other 9 first.  We want to do the small things first to get them out of the way so that we can then concentrate on the big thing.  However, we oftentimes have no energy or time to focus on what really matters, which is our top 20%.  We need to focus entirely on that important core by first defining what that core is.  If we think our 20% is actually our 80% or vice versa then we are in trouble.  Remember as Stephen Covey says before we climb the ladder of success we better know if the ladder is leaning against the right building.

We need to focus our energies to accomplish the top 20% so that we can accomplish so much more.  It also fills us with a sense of completion and joy when we do.  When we accomplish small tasks we do not feel the same sense of satisfaction.  We therefore do not get the endorphin rush that reinforces the good habit of eating that frog.  What is your frog today and are you going to eat it first?

However, this imagination of what we want is simply insufficient.  There must be planning on how to eat the elephant (or frog).  Why?  Because it allows us to work with maximal efficiency.  Without efficiency, our work life is unproductive and it can spill into our private lives.  The saying “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance” should be absorbed.  The 10/90 rule says that 10% of planning will allow us to be more efficient with the remaining 90% of time.  Even 10 minutes of accurate planning can shave off a couple of hours in the day to free us up to do other things that can be more productive.

When should we plan? Tracy argues that planning would be better accomplished the night before.  As we settle on what we need to move from the day’s tasks that were not completed, everything is fresh in our minds and we also then allow our subconscious mind during sleep to help guide us to what would be the best course of action the following morning.  When we awake, we can be instilled with a lot more energy, drive, and fresh ideas.  Of course, that morning, spending a few minutes to plan for the day will then allow us to take a chunk off the bigger elephant more effectively.

Here are seven steps that Tracy provides to help you eat that frog:

Step 1- Decide what you want. Sit down and simply start writing ideas of what you want in a free flowing manner.  You can and should then edit those ideas only after you have brainstormed on what you want.  You have to prioritize what is important to you.  We may in fact choose the wrong thing to do that will only compel us to waste precious time.  Steven Covey says, “Before you begin scrambling up the ladder of success, make sure that it is leaning against the right building.”

Step 2- Write it down. As I said, “Think on Paper”.  If it is not written, it is not going to be done; or it is going to be forgotten.  Unwritten goals are vague, confusing, and may never be accomplished.

Step 3- Set a deadline on your goal then set subdeadlines as needed. Without a deadline, goals have no urgency.  He encourages us all to feel a sense of pressure to do the task otherwise we simply put will never accomplish anything.

Step 4- Make a list of everything that you think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. This will help you define the right tools or steps to get the job done.  Without a list of action steps, we simply have a goal that is difficult to accomplish.

Step 5- Organize the list into a plan. Put priorities on your objective by putting priorities and sequence.  Write lines and arrows that join your boxes and circles so that you can naturally see the flow of action steps.  That will help you join the loose action steps into a cohesive and directed plan.

Step 6- Take action on your plan immediately.  Do something.  Do anything.  The hardest thing that I have noticed to do with any task is the initial work, e.g., starting a blog series, starting a workout routine, and for this weekend starting to prepare for 3 courses I am directing and 15 lectures that I need to prepare for in the coming month.

Step 7- Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your goal. What is so important is defining small chunks of time that you can do to chip away at the bigger task.  We need to work to accomplish the goal by defining quantifiable smaller measurements that allow us incrementally to accomplish the desired task.  For example, I will make sales calls to 10 people from 10 to 11 am every weekday.  I will read 10 pages of this novel every day except Sunday.  I shall write 2 pages of my essay every day until the task is completed.  Etc.

Every morning look at the hardest task first and eat that frog to move you forward to accomplish your goals.

Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! derives its title from Mark Twain’s saying that if we eat a live frog every day, that would be the worst thing that we would do that day and everything afterward will be by comparison easier.  I think most of us leave our frogs on the table and keep bumping it until the next day because we simply do not want to address that task, which allows procrastination to dominate our lives a little at a time.  I am certainly guilty of that as well.

If we have two ugly frogs, we tend to pick the lesser of the two frogs and bite that one first, leaving the bad frog on the table.  Tracy encourages us to eat the uglier frog first.  When we do that, we feel a sense of “Ahhhh” for the rest of the day, which provides fortitude of spirit, confidence, and unleashes a cascade of pleasurable endorphins.  We can literally become addicted to our productivity, as the positive reinforcement goes deeper into our emotional well being as much as it does just by the fact that a certain task has been accomplished.

Tracy encourages all of us to take action immediately.  Just by starting we can then progress a little at a time to accomplish our intended goals.  Without having any goals, we wander around in the desert.  We must start by outlining those goals and as we have talked about in our series on Maxwell Maltz we must visualize where we want to be not where we do not want to be.  If we see ourselves as productive, then we can actually accomplish more.  When we append words to ourselves like lazy, stupid, etc., we live our own limitations and nothing gets accomplished.  We must see and believe where we want to be.  He says we need 3 D’s:  decision (to do it), discipline (to incorporate that action), and determination (not to stop until it becomes a habit and task is done).

This series of blogs will be focused on how we can Eat that Frog! on a daily basis so that these productivity habits can be firmly ensconced into our daily ritual, all of which can be pleasantly reinforced by how good we feel that the frog has already been eaten and we can move on with more pleasant assignments.  I hope you join me, as we venture forth to eat that frog!