Book 7: Eat That Frog

February 21, 2022

Eat That Frog! is like reading an extended listicle. The book goes over 21 ways to stop procrastinating and instead work on your goals.

Some of the techniques are geared toward incremental progress, while others are more for someone who has trouble completing a task. I am personally wired to consider a task done when it’s 100% completed. Even then, I don’t feel that I’m ready to complete something until I see a very clear path to the end. This is a flaw and stength of mine in different circumstances.

3 Principles I Liked

#6: ABCDE Method

The reason I picked this is because I feel like “just do what’s important” is not specific enough. With this method of prioritizing there are 5 levels of activity:

A: Must do
B: Should do
C: Nice to do
D: Delegate
E: Eliminate

I like that there’s three categories of things to do personally as well as one for delegation. Virtual Freedom and The 4-hour Workweek both go into ways to delegate work. The category is probably larger than you think.

I disagree with some of the examples in the book, however. The author places things like phone calls to friends or contacts in the C category. This is a short-term view, which maybe makes sense for the book. Building relationships over the long term is not just nice to do, but necessary for success.

#14: Motivate Yourself Into Action

I have a tendency to complain about being tired (if I’m tired) or busy (if I’m busy). I also tend to be more pessimistic than I’d like. This is something I’ve been working on for years.

This rule is about how to motivate yourself internally by externally declaring you feel great and striving to find the good in any situation. That’s not to say you should lie about a serious problem, just don’t complain about trivialities.

The second part of this is visualization. As mentioned in The Miracle Morning, visualization of your future can have a huge impact on your motivation and eventually success. I don’t have this part nailed down yet, but I’m working on it.

#17: Focus Your Attention

This one really hit home. The company I currently work at has a tendency to over-notify engineers. I literally could not concentrate on any work with the default settings. I couldn’t concentrate on any work with the default settings for anything.

Notifications are the enemy. Be ruthless in removing them as much as possible. Android, at least, has the ability to turn off noisy notifications on a per-app and per-category basis. I use this heavily. I also almost never let any sites show notifications in my browser. This has helped my ability to concentrate immensely.

The major problem will all of these notifications is the inability to enter a state of concentration. There are various studies on the effects of interruptions, but anecdotally it can take from 15 to 30 minutes to regain concentration and even longer to re-enter a flow state.

For further reading on concentration I recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. It’s a great motivator for setting up a distraction-free work environment.

Short Form

The final chapter of the book summarizes the 21 principles in an easily digestible format. To keep these all in mind, I copied the chapter into a document so I could post them on the wall near my desk. These go next to a summary of the S.A.V.E.R.S. from The Miracle Morning.