Re-reading a book is a good habit to cultivate and specially books with wisdom that is timeless. A book that I often refer to is Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy.

The book contains 21 chapters to help you fight procrastination with simple tips and techniques that have worked for me and will also help you to be more productive. It is a quick read book and you may just need about 2 straight hours to grasp it.

The title is a little mystic but simply explained as doing the tough thing first. If you are sitting down to eat and your plate has a frog as one of the many items, then the author recommends that you eat the frog first because after that everything else you eat may be easily palatable.

If you tackle the toughest task of the day first, which may also be interpreted as the most important task then your productivity index will shoot up. Completing rest of the task becomes simpler as you no longer have the dreary thought that you will have to eat the frog today.

The book preaches the importance of planning and putting things down on paper. Visibility of tasks makes them achievable and having written them down forces you to think, at the same time, about execution too.

Brian Tracy gives some very practical ideas that I found interesting such as completing large tasks by breaking them down using multiple methods. You could either slice them by time-intervals spending a fixed interval of time doing the tasks, or dice them into smaller bits. Slicing like we do to a salami roll, or dicing it like we nibble at Swiss cheese.

It also contains some basic truths like getting started right away is the best way to get anything done. And complete what you started. Enjoy the satisfaction of completing tasks which in turns acts as motivation to pick up the next task. The author, like me, is also a believer of life-long learning and encourages continuous learning.

The ABCDE method of classifying tasks is a big hit with me, and while there are many techniques such as the 1–3–5 Things to do, I like his ABCDE method. Simply said, you make a list of things that you have to do for the day, and then mark them according to the following criteria:

A: I have to do it
B: I should do it (so, A takes precedent over B)
C: It would be nice to do it (so that’s lowest on the priority)
D: Someone else in my team can do it (delegate)
E: It does need to be done at all

Get a copy for yourself on Amazon, or read here more before getting your copy

https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/eat-that-frog/

https://www.njlifehacks.com/eat-that-frog-brian-tracy-summary

Hear it on SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/user-267285254/eat-that-frog-by-brian-tracy-audiobook-the-full-version