Mark Twain once advised that you should eat a live frog every morning, and you will then know that everything else that you do during the day will be more pleasant. Author Brian Tracy has used that concept as a metaphor for overcoming procrastination. In his book, “Eat That Frog,” Tracy advises us to think of the biggest and hardest of the tasks that we are facing, and do that first. Once it is out of the way, everything else will be easier – and we won’t be obsessing about the task that we have been avoiding.
Overcoming procrastination is a good skill for the maintenance of mental health. The advice about figuratively eating the frog is helpful and enables us to clear our minds and function in an efficient and proactive manner. I recommend, however, that the first step should be confronting the frog and determining if it has to be eaten at all. Some of the things that seem so big and so difficult and lead to procrastination are frogs that can co-exist with us. It may not be necessary to have that unpleasant discussion with a spouse, child, parent, friend neighbor, or co-worker if we accept that their point of view or behavior is not against the law – just different from ours. Sometimes recognizing that items go on sale over and over again may enable us to avoid a personal financial crisis by not making a major purchase that we don’t currently actually need. Sometimes we may have to remember that we have the right to say, “No,” and not explain our behavior to every salesperson or worthy cause or demand on our time.
Some frogs, however, have to be eaten. Some problems are critical to our personal growth or our work or our family life and won’t go away until they are addressed. When that happens, get in that habit of being decisive and addressing the problem quickly without avoiding it or procrastinating. It almost always feels better to deal with an unpleasant task and get it behind you than it does to stay stuck and keep agonizing about it. And if you are procrastinating about dealing with two difficult decisions or tasks, take Brian Tracy’s advice and, “eat the ugliest frog first.”