Have you eaten your frog today?

You are probably wondering what on earth I am going on about. I know I was thinking that when I was first asked.
As anyone who owns, runs or manages a business will know there are so many competing demands on your time. You have to look after your clients, perform administrative, marketing, finance, and business growth tasks. And there are only so many hours in the day in which to complete all these tasks. Prioritising all these activities is a task in itself.
I don’t know about you but I am perhaps a bit guilty of doing the jobs that are right in front of me. The tasks that are either easy or to keep the clients happy. And don’t misunderstand me, keeping my clients happy is extremely important to me. If I don’t keep them happy then ultimately I don’t have a business. But there are more difficult tasks. Tasks that don’t necessarily jump out at you. These tasks are the ones that will make a big difference to your business. The minority of tasks that will have the biggest long-term impact on your business. These are the tasks that you (and I) should be doing first.
Tackling these tasks that have the biggest impact first sounds like common sense doesn’t it. So why do we all swerve them so much. I know I am guilty of it. If you are totally honest with yourself are you guilty of it too?
What’s with the frog eating I hear you ask. Well these 10-20% of tasks that could give you 80-90% of the results you want are your frogs. Why? Well the saying goes, “If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long”.
These difficult tasks are your frogs. You should eat one first thing every day. Get the difficult stuff done and out the way. That gives you a great feeling when you cross them off your list.
My frog is working on marketing and sales activities. I must be honest and say I am working on eating that frog. It keeps eyeing me up though and putting me off. Perhaps it is fear of the unknown, or fear of indigestion, or then again perhaps it’s plain old procrastination.
So, what is your frog?
If your frog is to tackle poor service by your current IT provider, or to build an IT strategy to allow your business to flourish, then take the first bite of that frog and drop me a line. I would love to help you digest that frog. And by you eating your frog you might just be helping me eat mine too. Then we can both sit with full bellies and a satisfied smile as we share a coffee to wash it down.
These ideas are discussed in the book EAT THAT FROG by Brian Tracy.