In Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy borrows an image from Mark Twain: if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, the rest of the day will feel easy. The frog is your most important and most daunting task, the one you are most likely to put off.
The book is a practical manual against procrastination. Here are its three core ideas.
Eat the frog
The basic rule: start each day with your most important task, before anything else, without waiting to feel like it. Tackling the task you dread first frees up considerable energy and stops it hanging over your whole day. And if there are two frogs, eat the biggest one first.
Pareto and the ABCDE method
According to the Pareto principle, about 20 percent of your activities produce 80 percent of your results. The point is to spot those few high-value tasks rather than spreading yourself thin. To do this, Tracy offers the ABCDE method: rank your tasks from A (serious consequences if not done) to E (eliminate), and never move to a B task while an A task is unfinished.
Plan and break it down
Every minute of planning saves several in execution. Tracy recommends preparing your list the night before, so your brain works on it overnight and you start without hesitation. Faced with a big, intimidating task, slice it up: taken piece by piece, the frog becomes far easier to swallow.
Key takeaway
Eat That Frog! comes down to one discipline: identify what truly matters, then do it first. No complicated system, just the habit of starting with the most important thing when your energy and willpower are highest.
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