by S J Scott
Practice #4: Eat the Frog
In his classic book on how to overcome procrastination, Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy suggests that the best way to begin your day is to, well, “eat that frog.” The idea stems from a Mark Twain quote:
If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.
Tracy’s point is if you can complete the hardest task first, then you’ll begin with a major win that will make all the successive tasks or chores seem less daunting. It also will be motivating knowing that you’ve already tackled the one thing that you are most likely to procrastinate on.
This advice is perfect for anyone who frequently puts off tasks that require focus and hard work. If you can commit yourself to just getting started and working on your hardest task right away, then you’ll discover that’s it probably not as bad as you thought.
Once again, let’s go back to my writing example. This is a task that I’ll frequently dread or not want to do. But I also know that if I put it off for later in the day, then I’ll increase the likelihood that I’ll skip it or get distracted by another activity.
By committing myself to eat the frog first thing in the morning, I know that after 30–60 minutes of effort, I’ve already completed the most challenging task for the day.
Trust me: one of the most motivating experiences is knowing you’ve already completed the hardest task before 9:00 a.m.
Practice #5: Use the Eisenhower Matrix to Make Quick Decisions
While it’s great to imagine a perfect workday where you’re able to work on just your MITs in isolation, this rarely happens in the real world. If you’re like most people, your day is filled with a steady stream of small emergencies, random disruptions, and unexpected changes. These can feel overwhelming if you don’t have a framework that allows you to separate the important from the not-so-important.
That’s why I recommend using a simple decision-making strategy called the Eisenhower Matrix, so named because Dwight Eisenhower, prior to becoming the 34th president of the United States, served as a general in the army and as the Allied forces’ supreme commander during World War II.
During his time in the army, Eisenhower was faced with many tough decisions concerning the tasks he had to focus on every day. This led him to invent a principle that helps us today by prioritizing our tasks by urgency and importance. If this strategy was good enough to help Eisenhower lead hundreds of thousands of people, then it’s probably good enough to help with your procrastination issue. (Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, further popularized Eisenhower’s concept by supporting Eisenhower’s use of four quadrants to determine the urgency of one’s tasks.)
The Eisenhower Matrix prioritizes your tasks by urgency and importance, which results in four quadrants that each require a separate approach and strategy. In addition to sorting tasks by urgency and importance, the matrix also identifies tasks that you should either delegate or completely remove from your life. Following is a brief overview of this system. (If you want a downloadable version of this matrix, then you can grab a copy by signing up for the free companion website.)
Quadrant 1 (Q1): Urgent and Important
Quadrant 1 (Q1) tasks are the “do first” tasks, because they are critical for your life or career in some way and need to be finished right away. They are the tasks that need to be done in order to avoid negative consequences. It’s important to be able to manage the tasks that are in Q1 before anything else, so you want to get these tasks done as soon as possible.
An example of a Q1 task in your career may be answering a time-sensitive email from a client or finishing a report that’s due by the end of the day.
This matrix can also be used in your personal life. Examples of Q1 tasks in your personal life may be a crying baby, a medical emergency, or something burning in the oven.
Quadrant 2 (Q2): Important but not Urgent
Quadrant 2 (Q2) are the “decide when” tasks, because while they can have an amazing impact on your life, they don’t seem immediately critical like the Q1 tasks that need to be done right away.
Simply put, Q2 tasks usually relate to your long-term goals. In an ideal world, this is where you want to invest most of your time. But unfortunately, this is the area that’s the easiest to ignore because you’re too focused on the priorities from the other quadrants.
What are some examples of these tasks? Well, exercising is important to your health. So is spending time with your family or working on a certificate that will improve your career path. Usually, nobody is pushing you to complete Q2 activities, so it’s easy to let these tasks fall by the wayside.
Quadrant 3 (Q3): Urgent but not Important
Quadrant 3 (Q3) tasks are the “delegate it” tasks, because while they seem urgent, they can often be automated or passed off to someone who is better qualified to handle them.
This is the quadrant for those tasks that, in hindsight, turned out to be not very important. Taking on Q3 tasks often occurs when someone asks you to do something that does not directly benefit you or get you closer to achieving your goals. For Q3 tasks, it’s important to learn and remember how to delegate certain things.
When you think something is urgent when it isn’t, it’s usually caused by an outside source of distraction—like checking your email or phone or responding to people as soon as they try to contact you. You may think it is urgent at the moment, so you stop what you’re doing to tend to the matter, but in retrospect, the task wasn’t that crucial.
If you’re in the middle of working on a project and the phone rings, it’s not important for you to answer it. So, you can delegate this task to someone else. It may seem urgent while it is ringing, but a task like this can usually be handled by other people. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about how later in the book.)
Quadrant 4 (Q4): Not Important and not Urgent
Quadrant 4 (Q4) tasks are the “delete it” tasks, because they are the activities you should avoid at all costs. They are simply a complete waste of your time. If you are able to identify and eliminate all of your Q4 tasks, then you can free up much-needed time that can be reinvested in Q2 tasks.
Some examples of Q4 tasks are playing video games, watching television shows, mindlessly browsing the web, or fulfilling obligations that are other people’s priorities.
Does that mean nothing in Q4 should be a part of your life?
The short answer is no.
Having a balance between your professional and personal life is important, and downtime helps you regain your energy. The challenge here is to spend most of your time in Q2 and just enough time in Q4 to relax.
How to Use the Eisenhower Matrix to Overcome Procrastination
To get started with the Eisenhower Matrix, I recommend a simple exercise:
Print out the list that’s included in the companion website or create one on your own that’s divided into the four sections previously described.
Make seven copies of a blank grid for each week.
Each day, write down the tasks that you’d like to accomplish, putting them in the appropriate quadrant.
Whenever something new pops up, take a minute or two to think about the nature of the task and put it in the appropriate quadrant.
At the end of the week, when all of the grids are full, evaluate how effectively you spent your time and whether your process needs to be reorganized. Keep adjusting your schedule until you’re spending as much time as possible completing Q1 and Q2 activities.
Don’t worry if at first you find that most of your time is spent in “reaction mode,” with you mostly focusing on urgent activities in Q1 and Q3.
It’s normal to get fixated on the stuff that has a definitive deadline. But if you keep tracking your tasks using th
is matrix, asking yourself why you do each activity, and then redesigning your schedule, you’ll discover it’s not that hard to structure each day on the tasks that have the biggest impact on your long-term success.
Practice #6: Complete Quick Tasks Immediately
Have you ever procrastinated on a task that doesn’t require much effort, like cleaning the dishes after a meal, making a phone call, looking up a phone number, or sending an email? You know it doesn’t take much effort to complete. Yet you keep putting it off because you’re too busy or you think you don’t have time to do it.
This often happens because we fail to complete those small, seemingly unimportant tasks. By ignoring the activities that can be easily resolved, we build them up in our mind as being tougher than they actually are. On the other hand, if you learn to take immediate actions on small tasks, then you’ll prevent them from piling up. There are two strategies that can help you do this.
First, there is the Two-Minute Rule that David Allen recommends in Getting Things Done. If you know a task takes only a few minutes, then do it right away instead of writing it down on your to-do list or swearing that you’ll do it later.
Whenever you think of something that needs done, ask yourself: “How long will this take?”
If it’s only a minute or two, then do it right away instead of putting it off. You’ll find that doing this consistently will remove much of the negativity that happens when you have a lengthy list of tasks to complete.
On the other hand, if a task requires more than a few minutes of effort, then put it on your calendar and schedule time when you can take care of it.
The second strategy, closely related to the Two-Minute Rule, is to “single-handle” every task. Think of all the times you’ve opened an email, realized it required an action that you don’t have time to complete, so you put it off until later. Then when “later” comes, you open the same message, read it again, and then remember that the email requires a follow-up action.
Single-handling can remove the stress created by the small tasks you procrastinate on because it forces you to complete any task that you start. The idea here is whenever you begin something, you need to see it to its conclusion.
Here are a few examples:
Responding to an email when you open it or scheduling the specific action that’s need to “process” the message.
Rinsing a dish and putting it in the dishwasher after a meal instead of putting it in the sink.
Discarding junk mail into a recycling bin right when you receive it.
Putting away your clothes after wearing them instead of tossing them on a chair.
Returning phone calls immediately whenever you receive a voice mail.
It’s easy to procrastinate when you feel overwhelmed by your daily tasks, but if you take an extra minute or two to complete a simple action, you’ll find that it’s easy to eliminate some of the stress that comes from having a huge list of small tasks.
Practice #7: Create a Mini Habit for Challenging Tasks
As we’ve discussed, one reason people procrastinate is they know a task will require hard work. You’ll need to mentally (or physically) push yourself, so you keep putting it off and doing something else that results in a dopamine rush of instant gratification. It’s perfectly normal to avoid doing something you know might be unpleasant. But if you’re often struggling to get started on a challenging task, then a quick fix for that is to use the mini-habits strategy.
“Mini habits” is a term coined by my friend Stephen Guise, which appears in the book of the same name. The purpose of mini habits is to remove the resistance that you feel when it comes to starting a difficult (or time-consuming) task. It’s easy to schedule an activity into your day (like running for an hour), but it’s hard to complete when you feel a lack of interest.
Mini habits work because they eliminate motivation from the equation. Instead of setting an extremely challenging goal, you set a “lowball” goal that makes it super simple to get started. Let’s go over a scenario in the following paragraphs that illustrate this point.
Imagine you set a goal to exercise for 30 minutes. Everything goes perfectly the first week. You join a gym, attend a few classes, and enjoy the endorphin rush of frequent exercise.
One day, your boss asks you to work late, so you’re forced to skip your scheduled class. You tell yourself, “That’s okay, I’ll do it tomorrow.” But in the back of your mind, you start to doubt your commitment to this new exercise habit.
This pattern repeats itself over the next few weeks. You miss classes for a variety of reasons: Your kid has the flu. You didn’t pack your gym clothes. The roads are covered in snow. You have to wash your cat. Suddenly, this “30 minutes of exercise time” has turned into a task that feels impossible to do consistently. Stinks, doesn’t it?
The mini-habit concept prevents this scenario, because it eliminates that overwhelmed feeling you get when you think a task is too difficult to complete. To quote Stephen:
When people try to change, they usually try to get amped up for the change, but no matter how badly you want the change, you haven’t changed yet! As motivation wanes, so does progress. You don’t need more motivation, you need a strategy that can leverage the abilities of the current you into a better you.
In other words, the simplest, most effective way to create a lasting change is to create a goal that might seem too easy to complete but is also so easy that you can do it on a consistent basis.
So, if you’re finding yourself frequently procrastinating on a specific activity, then create the simplest possible habit you can think of to force yourself to get started. Here are a few examples:
Want to start writing? Set a goal to write one sentence.
Want to run more? Set a goal to put on your exercise clothes.
Want to improve your sales record? Set a goal to pick up the phone and call the first lead.
Want to improve your grades? Set a goal to spend five minutes reviewing your notes.
Want to improve your nutrition? Set a goal to eat one mouthful of a salad.
I’ll admit these goals seem ridiculously simple. But that’s the point—each activity is completely doable, no matter what your schedule is like. If you can push yourself to just get started, then often you’ll find yourself doing more of an activity than you initially anticipated.
Practice #8: Build Elephant Habits for Ongoing Projects
We’ve all heard this piece of advice before: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
The idea is that whenever you’re faced with a large, complex goal, all you need to do is chip away at it in small chunks.
Unfortunately, many people don’t apply this mindset to their lives. When they’re forced to tackle large projects, they procrastinate or even avoid them completely because the tasks seem insurmountable.
You, on the other hand, can take any large project and chip away at it using what I call elephant habits, which I discussed at length in my book Habit Stacking: 127 Small Changes to Improve Your Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Elephant habits are designed to overcome the natural resistance we all feel whenever we’re forced to do a potentially unpleasant, massive project. We know it must be done, but we avoid starting because dedicating a few days to it sounds as fun as getting a root canal. Thankfully, an elephant habit will help you complete a project one bite at a time.
The goal here is to chip away at a simple but time-consuming project in 5- to 15-minute daily increments. You can do this with many of the larger tasks on your to-do list, such as:
decluttering your home;
packing for a move;
organizing your paperwork (e.g., in preparation for tax season);
studying for an exam;
completing a time-consuming homework assignment; or
reading a difficult
book.
I use elephant habits whenever I’m faced with something unpleasant. Rather than building it up in my mind as a horrific ordeal, I overcome inertia by scheduling a 15-minute daily block where I can chip away at the project. (Usually, it’s tacked on to my morning routine or part of an existing habit stack, which we’ll cover in the next step.)
Elephant habits have a similar framework to the mini-habits concept that we’ve just discussed. When you tell yourself that a task takes “only” five minutes of your time, it’s easier to convince yourself to get started. And usually, once you get started, you’ll find yourself doing more of that activity than you originally planned.
Practice #9: Use Sprints to Work On Challenging Projects
Smart workers overcome their procrastination tendencies by condensing their efforts into short “sprints” and tracking them with a timer. The idea here is to work for a short period of time and then give yourself frequent breaks. The benefit of these sprints is that it’s easy to push yourself to get started when you know there is a clear stopping and starting point. Once you complete a sprint, you can take a quick break and then start a second sprint.
The strategy that I recommend for completing these sprints is a system called the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique is a popular time-blocking system, created in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, that has been embraced by entrepreneurs and work-efficiency experts.
Cirillo recognized that humans can focus for only a limited amount of time before becoming distracted. He found that it’s better to create a system where people focus for a condensed period and then proactively take a break before beginning the next sprint.