Have you eaten a frog yet?

Hey there, Goal Crusher and Dream Chaser!

This week and forward I am focused on eating the frog.

Here are 3 different ways to embrace this method:

1. Eisenhower Matrix

2. Morning Routine

3. Time Blocking

Mark Twain once said that if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.

The eat the frog strategy is a prioritization and productivity method used to help people identify difficult tasks.

Let’s dive deeper into each way of eating the frog before it multiplies and takes over your life.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Created by Dwight D Eisenhower, a renowned U.S. president of productivity.

This method is used to organize task by importance or urgency.

As Dwight would say “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Those that fell under both should be task you are doing now, otherwise schedule or delegate away.

If the task is neither important nor urgent, delete that task.

The Morning Routine

Sometimes, task can be bigger, those are what I call projects.

In that case, I like to use the “Pareto Principle” and embrace the 20/80 rule.

20% of the work is responsible for 80% of the results so focus on those tasks first.

But the hardest task are the most important ones to pull off.

That is why we should eat the frog bright and early in the day when we have the least resistance.

Wake up and choose to eat that frog. That way the rest of the day be devoted to family or watching cat videos on the internet.

Time Blocking

I also understand we don’t all have the sanctity of morning routines.

Time blocking fills in the gaps we are able to control.

Find empty slots in your day, week, or month, and fill them in.

Decide what your frog or project is and break it down into task.

But these 3 tools are what will make your time blocks most effective:

1. Checklist: Remember 20/80 rule and do the important task first.

2. Deep Focus: Sit and focus on the task that needs to be done.

3. Pomodoro Technique: Break down into 25-minute chunks.

The pomodoro technique is just deep focus but helps with burnout if you spend too long on a task, sometimes walking away and coming back with fresh eyes is the answer.

In Summary

Let’s summarize how you can make the most use of what we learned in this letter:

1. Eat the frog: List all important and urgent task down

2. Eisenhower Matrix: Organize by importance/urgency

3. Morning Routine: Do important task earlier than later

4. Time Blocking: Schedule or delegate task using blocks

5. Pareto Principle: Use the 20/80 rule to find biggest results

Keep to these principles and you should become more productive in less time.

As I like to say, less is more when it comes to productivity.

Yours in digital success,

Timothy Cortez