EAT THAT FROG! TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Introduction …………. Eat That Frog Chapter 1......................Set the Table Chapter 2......................Plan Every Day In Advance Chapter 3......................Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything Chapter 4......................Consider the Consequences Chapter 5………………Practice Creative Procrastination Chapter 6......................Use the ABCDE Method Continually Chapter 7......................Focus on Key Result Areas Chapter 8......................The Law of Three Chapter 9......................Prepare Thoroughly Before You Begin Chapter 10……………..Take It One Oil Barrel at a Time Chapter 11....................Upgrade Your Key Skills Chapter 12....................Leverage Your Special Talents Chapter 13....................Identify Your Key Constraints Chapter 14....................Put the Pressure on Yourself PAGE 1 EAT THAT FROG! Chapter 15....................Maximize Your Personal Power Chapter 16....................Motivate Yourself into Action Chapter 17....................Get Out of the Technological Time Sinks Chapter 18....................Slice and Dice the Task Chapter 19....................Create Large Chunks of Time Chapter 20....................Develop a Sense of Urgency Chapter 21....................Single Handle Every Task Conclusion…………….Putting It All Together PAGE 2 EAT THAT FROG! PREFACE Thank you for picking up this book. I hope these ideas help you as much as have helped me and thousands of others. In fact, I hope that this book changes your life forever. There is never enough time to do everything you have to do. You are literally swamped with work and personal responsibilities, projects, stacks of magazines to read and piles of books you intend to get to one of these days as soon as you get caught up. But the fact is that you are never going to get caught up. You will never get on top of your tasks. You will never get far enough ahead to be able to get to all those books, magazines and leisure time activities that you dream of doing. And forget about solving your time management problems by becoming more productive. No matter how many personal productivity techniques you master, there will always be more to do than you can ever accomplish in the time you have available to you, no matter how much it is. You can only get control of your time and your life by changing the way you think, work and deal with the never ending river of responsibilities that flows over you each day. You can only get control of your tasks and activities to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few things that can really make a difference in your life. PAGE 3 EAT THAT FROG! I have studied time management for more than thirty years. I have immersed myself in the works of Peter Drucker, Alex Mackenzie, Alan Lakein, Stephen Covey and many, many others. I have read hundreds of books and thousands of articles on personal efficiency and effectiveness. This book is the result. Each time I came across a good idea, I tried it out in my own work and personal life. If it worked, I incorporated it into my talks and seminars and taught it to others. Galileo once wrote, “You cannot teach a person something he does not already know; you can only bring what he does know to his awareness.” Depending upon your level of knowledge and experience, these ideas will sound familiar. This book will bring them to a higher level of awareness. When you learn and apply these methods and techniques over and over until they become habits, you will alter the course of your life in a very positive way. PAGE 4 EAT THAT FROG! MY OWN STORY Let me tell you something about myself and the origins of this little book. I started off in life with few advantages, aside from a curious mind. I did poorly in school and left without graduating. I worked at laboring jobs for several years. My future did not appear promising. As a young man, I got a job on a tramp freighter and went off to see the world. For eight years, I traveled and worked, and then traveled some more, eventually visiting more than eighty countries on five continents. When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got into sales, knocking on doors, working on straight commission. I struggled from sale to sale until I began looking around me and asking, “Why is it that other people are doing better than I am?” Then I did something that changed my life. I began to ask successful people what they were doing that enable them to be more productive and earn more money than me. And they told me. And I did what they advised me to do, and my sales went up. Eventually, I became so successful that they made me a sales manager. As a sales manager, I used the same strategy. I asked successful managers what they did to achieve such great results, and when they told me, I went out and did the same things. In no time at all, I began to get the same results they did. PAGE 5 EAT THAT FROG! This process of learning and applying what I had learned changed my life. I am still amazed at how simple and obvious it is. Just find out what other successful people do and do the same things until you get the same results. Learn from the experts. Wow! What an idea. Success Is Predictable Simply put, some people are doing better than others because they do things differently and they do the right things right. Especially, successful, happy, prosperous people use their time far, far better than the average person. Coming from an unsuccessful background, I had developed deep feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. I had fallen into the mental trap of assuming that people who were doing better than me were actually better than me. What I learned was that this was not necessarily true. They were just doing things differently, and what they had learned to do, within reason, I could learn as well. This was a revelation to me. I was both amazed and excited with this discovery. I still am. I realized that I could change my life and achieve almost any goal I could set if I just found out what others were doing in that area and then did it myself until I got the same results they were getting. Within one year of starting in sales, I was a top salesman. A year later I was made a manager. Within three years, I became a vice-president PAGE 6 EAT THAT FROG! in charge of a 95 person sales force in six countries. I was twenty-five years old. Over the years, I have worked in twenty-two different jobs, started and built several companies, earned a business degree from a major university, learned to speak French, German and Spanish and been a speaker, trainer or consultant for more than 1000 companies. I currently give talks and seminars to more than 250,000 people each year, with audiences as large as 20,000 people. A Simple Truth Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. It is this: the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book. This book is written to show you how to get ahead more rapidly in your career and to simultaneously enrich your personal life. These pages contain the twenty-one most powerful principles on personal effectiveness I have ever discovered. These methods, techniques and strategies are practical, proven and fast acting. In the interests of time, I do not dwell on the various psychological or emotional explanations for procrastination or poor time management. There are no lengthy departures into theory or research. What you will learn are specific actions you can take PAGE 7 EAT THAT FROG! immediately to get better, faster results in your work, and to increase your happiness with your family and other people. Every idea in this book is focused on increasing your overall levels of productivity, performance and output, and on making you more valuable in whatever you do. You can apply many of these ideas to your personal life as well. Each of these twenty-one methods and techniques is complete in itself. All are necessary. One strategy might be effective in one situation and another might apply to another task. All together, these twenty-one ideas represent a smorgasbord of personal effectiveness techniques that you can use at any time, in any order or sequence that makes sense to you at the moment. The key to success is action. These principles work to bring about fast, predictable improvements in performance and results. The faster you learn and apply them, the faster you will move ahead in your career, guaranteed! There will be no limit to what you can accomplish when you learn how to “Eat That Frog!” Brian Tracy PAGE 8 EAT THAT FROG! INTRODUCTION This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more possibilities and opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals than exist today. And as perhaps never before in human history, you are actually drowning in options. In fact, there are so many good things that you can do that your ability to decide among them maybe the critical determinant of what you accomplish in life. If you are like most people today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new tasks and responsibilities just keep rolling in, like the waves of the ocean. Because of this, you will never be able to do everything you have to do. You will never be caught up. You will always be behind in some of your tasks and responsibilities, and probably in many of them. The Need to Be Selective For this reason, and perhaps more than ever before, 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. An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles PAGE 9