Product Description

There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do in the morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s probably the worst thing you’ll do all day.

Eat That Frog! takes this saying as a metaphor for tackling the most challenging task of your day – the one you are most likely to procrastinate on, but also probably the one that will have the greatest positive impact on your life. Bestselling author Brian Tracy shows how successful people don’t try to do everything, but instead focus on the most important tasks.

With three vital rules of effective personal time management: decision, discipline and determination, and twenty-one practical and doable steps to help you stop procrastinating, this book will appeal to anyone who wants to get more of those important tasks done - today!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6602 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
Brian Tracy is a leading authority on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness. He addresses over 250,000 people each year on the subjects of personal and professional development.

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Little Book
Eat That Frog is short, snappy and to the point.
Most books of this nature drone on about how great they are, and how much they will change your life etc; but once you've finished reading them the hype evaporates and you carry on as before. This book is different. It's small and unassuming... but it packs a punch that you will never forget. Based on the effect it's had on me I can genuinely say that it's a life changing book, and I heartily recommend you give it a go. It's not like it's too expensive to buy!

A much needed kick-up-the-bum!!
A book about time management and avoiding task avoidance needs to be short, sharp and to the point. This succeeds in every way.
With short pick up and put down chapters, easy to remember rules and highly entertaining analogies this book threatens the frog population worldwide.
As a master of procrastination, I finaly got round to reading this and haven't looked back since.
Buy it...
Read it...
Get on with it...and eat that frog.

An easy read with a lot of sound advice.
This is an easy read, and it contains a lot of sound advice - although none of the ideas is particularly new. As it is very list based, it will only appeal to people who like working with lists.

A 'frog' is defined as a task that is likely to make a major impact on your success, something important and possibly also substantial. It may also be a hard or 'ugly' task, which leads to a temptation to procrastinate. Tracy advocates 'eating' the ugliest frog first and avoiding the temptation to do easier pleasanter tasks.

Tracy leads the reader through the steps he believes you need to take to achieve greater effectiveness and success and to overcome procrastination. He starts with the importance of written goals - clarity about what you want to achieve. Setting yourself deadlines is an essential part of this process. Both these views are conventional time management wisdom, and they are very important. Tracy suggests that we need to develop an action orientation, for which goals are the basis. They are also the basis for task lists, with an ever-updated Master List being used as a foundation for monthly, weekly and daily action lists. These lists, in turn, are used as a basis for prioritising and planning - with further lists of activities for each project or task.

Interestingly, Tracy uses a straight line prioritising tool - from A (frog) to E (eliminate), and does not mention the quadrant method which has become more prevalent recently, and which is advocated as an important tool for prioritisation in Stephen R. Covey's 'First Things First'.

One of the messages I liked was the recognition - which is not always given in time management books - that most people are operating at full or more than full capacity, so there is a need to accept that you will never catch up with everything you want to do. This is why you need to learn to focus on the 'frogs' and key result areas and learn 'creative procrastination' with regard to most of the rest.

I also liked the emphasis on long-term planning as a framework within which to set goals and priorities. There is sound advice on continual self-improvement, too. Tracy advocates identifying your strengths and weakenesses within the context of your key result areas, so that you can leverage your strengths and work to build skills and abilities in the weaker areas.

If you work well with lists, the book provides sound, easy-to-follow steps which will undoubtedly help you to build your personal effectiveness.