Procrastination Sucks — So Here’s
The “Eat That Frog” Way to Powerful Productivity
PART
II
Step 2 — Organize
the Biggest Frogs Down to the Tiniest Tadpoles
Recognizing
the difference between high-value and low-value activities is the core of Eat That Frog. It’s the core of
most productivity advice.
If
you learn only one thing from this post, I hope it’s the ability to separate
true contribution and value from everything else that doesn’t really matter.
Do More of
What’s Working
This
advice is so important that I had to put it first, even though it’s not from
Eat That Frog. It comes from a great post by Justin Jackson.
If
something you’re doing is working, do more of it. Recognize when you have a hit
on your hands.
If
your side project is growing without much effort, keep working on it. Don’t
start on some new brain fart of an idea.
If
you’re doing something for your career that is getting recognized, like giving
talks at conferences, do more of it.
If
people love what you write, write more.
It’s
rare to strike gold. So when you do, put more of your time and energy into
mining that precious vein, and eliminate everything that doesn’t add to its
success.
Organize Your List with
the ABCDE Approach
If
you haven’t struck gold yet, that’s OK.
There’s
work to be done before opportunity can even show up. Your chances increase when
you’re working on high impact activities, not low value nonsense.
We
can give weight to each activity using the ABCDE method.
Think
about how much each item moves you towards your goal. Think about the short-term
and long-term consequences of doing or not doing each thing on your list.
A
items — Things you must do, which
will have a serious positive or negative consequence if you do or don’t do it.
If you have multiple A items, rank them A-1, A-2, etc.
B
items — Things you should do. Tadpoles
that have minor consequences. Someone might be inconvenienced if you don’t do
these things, but it’s not the end of the world. Never do a B task when an A
task is left unfinished.
C
items — Things that are nice to do but
don’t have any real consequences when they’re done. These items can be chunked
together and done all at once when you finish your A tasks. For example,
replying to emails.
D
items — Things to delegate so you can
free up more time to do A tasks.
E
items — Things to eliminate. Generally stuff
you do out of habit, like checking social media or reading news headlines.
Let’s
stick with the “Land your dream job” goal.
Applying
to jobs by submitting your resume everywhere might seem like the obvious A
activity, but there are bigger impact ways to achieve this goal.
Spend
time researching the companies you would love to work for. Get to know
everything about them, as if you already work there. Connect with people who do
work there. Find the decision makers. Take a recruiter out to lunch. Spend time
writing a thoughtful cover letter. Read great books on getting hired like “What
Color is Your Parachute?” Spend lots of time thinking about how you can
contribute and add value on day one.
Strive
to be in the top 10% of candidates and stop doing what 90% of people do.
Eliminate the shotgun strategy of blindly uploading your resume to any and
every available job opening. Your chances are so much higher with an
intentional, laser-focused approach.
Ask Yourself the
Great Question
“What one skill, if I developed and did it in
an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on
my career?”
Look into yourself for the answer. Ask your
boss this question. Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends and your family. Whatever
the answer is, find out and then go to work to bring up your performance in
this area.
The best way to figure
out how you can add value, especially if you’re employed or doing work for
somebody, is to ask. Have a conversation about it.
Step 3 — Choose
Your Top 3 Frogs
If you did the exercises
above, you should have a pretty big list of things to do.
Now accept that you’re never
going to do it all. There’s never enough time and there never will be. But your
goal is not to become the best “checker of lists.”
80% of your results will
come from 20%, maybe less, of the items on your list. Out of all your frogs,
which one (three at most) is going to have the biggest impact on your life?
Step 4 — Create
Your Daily System
You
don’t have control over a company hiring you. You don’t have control over
getting a raise. You don’t have control over how the market responds to your
startup or side project.
What
you do have control over is how many big, ugly frogs you can eat in a day.
You
have control of continuous elimination and delegation of things that don’t add
value.
You
have control of committing to your routine, day after day, to become a person
of action.
We’re
not trying to be busy for 18 hours a day here. We just want to commit those few
precious hours, when our ability to concentrate and focus is highest, on our
most important and difficult things.
For
most people, it’s in morning before the distractions of the day claw at your
time.
Learning
to code is huge mountain to climb for beginners, especially if you have a
limited amount of time. But when you break it down into actionable steps, you
can form a daily system.
Two
hours on instructor driven learning, like a Frontend Masters course or freeCodeCamp exercises.
Next
hour learning tools and theory, like Github or JavaScript best practices.
Last
hour is spent building stuff and writing code. One of the best ways as a
beginner is to extend and build on the code examples you do in the courses from
the first few hours.
As
you get more experienced, the contents of each hour will change, but the system
remains the same.
My Frog Eating System
I
want to produce practical and useful content that you can implement to help
your career. My fear is that I’ll spend days writing something that no one will
read or care about.
So
I procrastinate. That is, until I toughen up and eat the frog.
My
best writing comes in the morning when I open my laptop and start writing. I
block all my distracting websites, put my phone in another room, start a Pomodoro timer, then write.
I
start writing even when I have nothing to say, or if my thoughts are all over
the place. These don’t make for good articles. But I keep taking bites of this
big, nasty frog until the good stuff gets teased out.
The
most productive code I write at my job happens the same way.
I
get into the office early, turn off the distractions, and start working on the
hardest, most difficult thing on my list. This thing is important to the
company and other stakeholders, like a new feature, performance optimization,
or fixing a major defect. I add value by helping the people above me look good.
Most
days, I only have the stomach to eat these frogs for a few hours before I get
tired.
But
in those few, highly-focused hours, I add more value in a day than I would in a
week if I were jumping around between a bunch of unimportant things without any
intention.
The
rest of the day is spent on tadpoles like responding to Slack and emails,
fixing minor bugs, and planning work for tomorrow. These activities have some impact
and require some effort.
The
things I absolutely avoid at work are mindless activities that have zero impact
on my company or career, like browsing Hacker News, Reddit, or social media.
I’d
be lying if I said I didn’t succumb to these entertaining temptations at times.
I just do everything in my power to start my day with my most difficult tasks and get as far
along on those as I can.
The Biggest, Ugliest
Frog in the World is Finishing
Creative
people, especially the ones with an entrepreneurial trait, are notorious for
starting projects and not finishing them. The next idea comes. It’s newer and
shinier, so we chase that.
Our
hard drives are a wasteland of ideas, articles, and half finished apps that
seemed like good opportunities at the time. How’s that novel coming along, Brian?
When
you don’t finish stuff, when you don’t release it out into the public, you’ll
never reach the top 10% of anything. You might as well have not started in the
first place.
I
get that some ideas and projects are not worth finishing. I get that there’s an
art of knowing when to quit. I get that there’s a obsession with
struggling.
But
I think most of the time we quit when we’re a few short feet from gold.
You
have to finish because that’s the only way you’re going to get the feedback you
need to decide if what you’re doing is adding value.
Don’t
start learning Android development because learning JavaScript got too hard.
Don’t dive into machine learning because Android development got too hard, and
heck, that sounds like the hot new thing, so yeah, I’ll just do that!
Don’t
give up on your side project because you couldn’t figure out how to join two
database tables.
Don’t
start writing the next article before you finish the last one. Don’t start the
next project unless you finish the the one you’re working on now.
If
this is you, then tomorrow’s frog is finishing. Not eight hours starting something
new.
Commit
to thirty minutes, or an hour, whatever you need to finish your frog.
Finish
it, launch it, and walk away
Bar Franek https://medium.freecodecamp.org/procrastination-sucks-so-heres-the-eat-that-frog-way-to-powerful-productivity-543b07ecf360
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