Eat That Frog
Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.
written on: 2025-09-05
This is a classic, but I am just now reading it. 21 is a lot of steps and I’ve already forgotten the majority of them. But these books do always make me hungry (not just for frogs).
From his list of reccomendations, the biggest thing I started integrating into my life was writing down my plan for the next day the evening before. I have been doing this for about two weeks now, and I have to say it does seem to make a difference. It makes it feel like those bigger tasks (or frogs) are doable. Past a certain hour I skip this, it gets my mind racing too close to when I would like to sleep. If I miss my writing window, I skip it, which has only happened a couple times.
In general, I somewhat disagree with the philosophy of eating the biggest and ugliest frog first. Often times we need a few small wins to get going. And in software engineering, the biggest most complex projects can’t be done in a day or one sitting, but over several weeks. He suggests chunking this down into smaller frogs, and yeah, duh. He is coming at this from a perspective of sales, which has a lot of shorter timespan projects (create a PowerPoint about x, organize this spreadsheet, call and set up meetings with these 5 clients etc). I can see how eating the ugliest frog first could be helpful in that sort of environment, when you aren’t constantly stomping out bugs, not just eating frogs.