The book Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracy lists greatly, a pack of "rules" that can help people to stop procrastinating.
Of course, it is never that easy, but some techniques can always help.
This article has all the 21 rules in a quick overview.
1. Set the table
Before anything, decide what you need or must do. Your purpose. Write it down, set a deadline, make a plan and do it.
Yes, write it down.
2. Plan Every Day in Advance
Planning your day should take 10 to 12 minutes, but it is said to save you up to 2 hours in wasted time in your future day.
3. Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything
Focus on the top 20% most important work you have to do. They will represent 80% of what must be delivered.
If you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth much more than the other eight items put together.
4. Consider the consequences
You will never have enough time to do everything you need to do.
People need to have long-term plans and be aware of what can be left aside that will not become a problem to achieve the long-term goal.
5. Practice Proactive Procrastination
The fact is that you cannot do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something.
So, do the worst first! The biggest and most complicated. Eat the big frost first.
Decide to outsource, delegate, and eliminate those activities that don't make much of a contribution to your life.
Learn to say no!, and say it politely.
To do something new, you will need to stop doing something old.
6. Use the ABCDE Method Continually
Make a list of everything you need to do for your next day. Write it down on a paper.
Beside each item, assign a letter A, B, C, D or E in an order of importance (A: most important; E less important).
Never, ever do a task marked with B, before a task marked as A.
Tasks marked as D can probably be delegated. Tasks marked as E can probably be eliminated.
7. Focus on Key Result Areas
A key result area is something that, if you don't do, does not get done.
Discuss it with your boss, understand what is your purpose for the company or team, and work on it.
Give yourself a grade. Search areas where you are doing a good job and areas that you must improve.
You may be only one critical skill away from top performance at your job.
Ask yourself:
What one skill, if I develop and do it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?
Decide on doing these analyses regularly for the rest of your career. Never stop improving. This decision alone can change your life.
8. Apply the Law of Three
- In thirty seconds, write down your three most important goals in life right now.
In 80% or more of the cases, people will have the three first things in common:
- a financial and career goal
- family or relationship goal
- heal or fitness goal
Rule: it is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.
Don't waste time. Time that you waste at work often has to be taken away from your family.
And, the more time you spend face-to-face with the people you love, the happier you will be.
9. Prepare Thoroughly Before You Begin
Create a comfortable workspace, be it at home or work.
Don't expect perfection the first time, or even the first few times.
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take
Feel effective, efficient, and ready to get going each time you sit down to work.
10. Take it One Oil Barrel at a Time
By the yard it's hard; but inch by inch, anything is a cinch!
You need to get your mind off the big task in front of you and focus on a single action that you can take.
One of the best ways to eat a big frog is to take it one bite at a time.
11. Upgrade Your Key Skills
Upgrading your skills is one of the most important personal productivity principles of all.
Always remember, however good you are today, your knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete at a rapid rate.
Rule: Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.
Three Steps to Mastery
- Read in your field for at least one hour every day.
- Take every course and seminar available on the key skills that can help you. Dedicate yourself to becoming one of the most knowledgeable and competent people in your field.
- Listen to audio programs in your car.
12. Identify Your Key Constraints
Between where you are and the goal you want to achieve, there are constraints. Your job is to identify what could be holding you back clearly.
This could be hard to find, but if there are a few constraints, you can apply the 80/20 Rule to work on them.
There are 80% of the constraints that are internal. They are within you, your qualities, abilities, and habits.
There are 20% of the limiting factors that are external - competition, markets, governments, or other organizations.
Try to identify what could be acting as a brake on the achievement of your goals.
13. Put the Pressure on Yourself
The problem is: no one is coming to rescue you.
Only 2% of people can work entirely without supervision. They are called leaders.
To reach your full potential, you must form the habit of putting pressure on yourself.
Raise your bar. Push yourself to be better every day.
Work as though you had only one day to get your most important jobs done.
By putting pressure on yourself, you will accomplish more tasks better and faster than ever. You will become a high-performance, high-achieving personality.
14. Motivate Yourself into Action
To keep yourself motivated, you must resolve to become an optimist. You must decide to respond positively to the words, actions and reactions of the people and situations around you. You must refuse to let the unavoidable difficulties and setbacks of daily life affect your mood or emotions.
Control Your Inner Dialogue
Say, "I like myself! I like myself!".
Say, "I can do it!, I can do it!".
Say, "I feel terrific!".
As speaker-humorist Ed Foreman says:
You should never share your problems with others because 80% of people don't care about them anyway, and the other 20% are kind of glad that you've got them in the first place.
Develop Mental Positive Attitude
Optimism is the most important quality you can develop for personal and professional success and happiness. Optimistic people seem to be more effective in almost every area of life.
It turns out that optimists have four special behaviors:
First: look for the good.
Second: see the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty.
Third: look for the solution to every problem.
Fourth: think and talk continually about their goals.
15. Technology Is a Terrible Master
Technology can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It becomes the enemy when we give in to an obsessive need to communicate continually.
When people are too plugged in, communications technology quickly becomes a destructive addiction.
Apply the 80/20 Rule to your emails. There are 80% of your message with no value. Of the other 20%, only about 4% require immediate responses. The other 16% could be transferred to an action folder to be worked on later.
Unsubscribe from all unwanted newsletters.
If there is something really important that you are afraid to miss by not being connected, it always ends up that if it is really important, someone will tell you.
16. Technology Is a Wonderful Servant
You must discipline yourself to treat technology as a servant, not as a master.
Make sure that only the communication channels you need to complete your task are opened.
Show your smartphone who is the boss by disabling all notifications - both audio and visual.
Segment your communication channels so that only frogs can hop into your castle of concentration.
Take control of your time with a to-do list. It is a powerful tool for taking control of your time. It can be programmed to remind you about the most important tasks.
And, if you become frustrated, just remember that it happens to everyone; even expert programmers who make hundreds of dollars per hour will sometimes be frustrated with technology.
17. Focus Your Attention
Focused attention is the key to high performance.
Current research proves that continuously responding and reacting to e-mails, telephone calls, texts, and instant messages has a negative effect on your brain, shortening your attention span and making it difficult, if not impossible, for you to complete the tasks.
Developing an Addiction
When you check your e-mail, first thing in the morning or when you respond to the bell or other sound that indicates an incoming e-mail or message, your brain releases a tiny shot of dopamine. This shot gives you a pleasant "buzz".
When you start your day with a few shots of dopamine triggered by your e-mail or IM bell going off, you find it extremely difficult to pay close attention to your important tasks for the rest of the day.
The Multitasking Illusion
People can focus only on one thing at a time. When people say that they can do more than one thing at a time, they are doing what is called task shifting.
After an Internet interruption, it takes about 17 minutes for you to shift your total attention back to your task and continue working.
The Proven Solutions
Do NOT check your e-mail in the morning and immediately trigger the all-day dopamine addiction. Leave your devices off.
Decide to check your e-mails only twice a day, at 11am and 3pm.
Never insult the person you are meeting with by working on your laptop or answering your phone. Pay 100% attention to the other people. This applies at home as well.
Double Your Productivity
Plan each day in advance, select your most important task, and then start on that task first thing, before you do anything else.
Work for 90 minutes without any break, then give yourself a 15 minutes break. Keep doing it repeatedly.
18. Slice and Dice the Task
To cut a big task down to size is the "salami slice" method.
When you start and finish a small piece of a task, you feel motivated to start and finish another part, the other one, and so on.
I have several friends who have become bestselling authors by simply resolving to write one page or even one paragraph per day until the book was completed.
19. Create Large Chunks of Time
Schedule large chinks of time for a designated task. Let's say, use the time between 10am and 11am to call all your clients that you need to get feedback from.
As a result of the well-defined time for the task, you become more and more productive and eventually produce two times, three times as much as an average person.
Get up 3 hours earlier and work it without interruptions at home. You can get three times more work done at home without interruptions.
One of the keys to high levels of performance and productivity is to make every minute count.
20. Develop a Sense of Urgency
Do not wait: the time will never be "just right".
High-performing men and women have the quality of "action orientation". They are in a hurry to get their key tasks completed.
As a result, they seem to power through enormous amounts of work in the same amount of time that the average person spends socializing, wasting time, and working on low-value activities.
Develop a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency feels very much like running against yourself. You concentrate on the things you can do right now to get the results you want to achieve the goals you desire.
The faster you move, the more impelled you feel to do even more even faster. You enter "the zone".
Build a Sense of Momentum
Although it may be tremendous amounts of energy to overcome inertia and get started initially, it. then takes far less energy to keep going.
The faster you move, the more competent and capable you become at your work.
A sense of urgency shifts you automatically onto the fast track in your career.
Do It Now!
One of the simplest things to repeat to yourself: "Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!". "Back to work! Back to work! Back to work!".
Nothing will help you more in your career than for you to get the reputation for being the kind of person who gets important work done quickly and well.
21. Single Handle Task
By concentrating single-mindedly on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50% or more.
When you prepare thoughroughly and then begin, refusing to stop or turn aside until the job is done, you develop energy, enthusism, and motivation.
Once you have decided on your number one task, anything else that you do other than that is a waste of time.
Elbert Hubbart defines self-discipline as:
the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.
Once you start your most important task, discipline yourself to persevere without diversion or distraction until it is 100% complete.
Conclusion
Develope the habit of eating your frog first thing every day when you start work. Repeat it every day.
Review the 21 rules and principles regularly until they become firmly ingrained in your thinkgin and actions, and your future will be guaranteed.
Make a decision to practive these principles every day until they become second nature to you.
Just do it! Eat that frog!.
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