As part of my drive to be more efficient I have been working through several books on getting things done, including the often referenced Eat That Frog!
Eat that frog is a book that is well known and often referenced in other productivity books, both in support of and against the ideas presented in it. I like a good list, so managing a lot of what we do through lists is something that I am really attracted to and since reding the book I have maintained three lists on my wall of tasks to do this week, this quarter and what I want to achieve this year. They have certainly added focus to what I am doing.
On the whole I think it is one of the most useful books I have read and certainly one that I would pass onto others. I am not going to be chanting “EAT THAT FROG” at people, but it is great for encouraging proactive thought and better planning.
The principle of delegating or just not doing lower priority tasks is exposed in the book and it is something that I find a little harder to grapple with. As someone who takes a lot of personal responsibility I find delegation challenging at times. The 15 secrets of highly successful people and the one minute manager which I have also read stressed delegation as well, with anything that is not core to your job or how you relax being candidates to hand off to someone else, in theory allowing you to be an incredibly focused individual.
Honestly I am not sure I can work with the same sort of laser focus advocated in these books. I often have ideas that veer off from my core skills that I want to try and explore. Having said that I am looking at pruning these back and getting down to having only one side project at a time is definitely on my long term objectives.
Will I be doing everything in the book everyday? No, I don’t think I will be, but I will take learnings from it and use these to help me improve my productivity and focus, so at the end of the day it helps me achieve what I set out to do when I started reading it.