Not To Be Trusted With Knives

#9 – Book Review: Eat That Frog

July 25, 2009 by Beth

Hot off the heels of listening to my first audiobook in the car on the way to and from work, I decided to see if the library had the next book on my list to read: Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy.  This is the one I found on in e-format!

Eat That Frog is a book about not procrastinating.  Basically, it tells you to stop procrastinating already.  I mean, it did have some tips in it – the main one, which he states over and over again – is to figure out which task is your main priority (i.e., which task if going to get you the biggest and best results) and then do it.  Make it the first thing you do in the morning – don’t dilly dally checking your email, chatting to co-workers, or doing other low (or no) value tasks.  Just do it. I was hoping there would be some sure fire way to kick my butt out of procrastination mode, but this book just told me to set my mind to it and then do it.  But I wanted a magic bullet!!

Also, he does say a few things that are just a bit ridculous:

• he claimes you should get 8 hours of sleep a night, at least 30 minutes of exercise per day¹, read a full hour every day on your field to become more expert, take a full day per week off from any work, go into work a little bit early and stay a little bit late everyday, eat healthy (no junk food – meaning you’ll spend a fair amount of time grocery shopping, cooking & cleaning up after)…. it just doesn’t seem there’s enough hours in the day to do all he says
• he also contradicts himself – at one point, he talks about spending time with family & friends as being the most important thing – it’s why you want to work more efficiently, so you’ll have time to socialize and be part of the community. Then he admonishes you not to “waste time” talking with your co-workers.
• It seems like he makes us numbers. I mean, this might just be the academic in me coming out (why aren’t you citing your sources?? Oh right, it’s a book for the general public, not the New England Journal of Medicine!), but he throws around things like “doing X will make you 2, 3 or even 4 x more effective!” and “50% of a worker’s time is spent doing Y!” without every referencing where this comes from².
• He takes a page out of the Stuart Smalley handbook, pretty much telling you that you should be saying “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and gosh darnit, people like me!  Except that I don’t talk with any of them at work because they are not a value use of my time.”

Also, one of his suggestions was to listen to education audio programs, such as this one, while in your car.  The average worker “wastes” 20 billion hours a year driving, so why not make it productive by learning stuff?  And I was all “I *am* listening to this in my car!”  And then I felt superior.

In fairness, since reading³ this book, I have decided to make more of a conscious effort to do my most important task first thing in the morning (instead of my usual email checking) and to even have my e-newsletters not show up in my inbox, so I don’t get distracted by them and can scan through them all at once, in a more efficient way, rather than being constantly jolted out of my important work when I see “ooh, there’s something in my inbox! Must check now!!”  It’s not like I didn’t know that I should do this, but I decided to actually challenge myself – since apparently no one is about to give me a magic anti-procrastination bullet!

¹Citing the old recommendations. Current recommendations are to exercise an hour a day, so he’ll need to update that.
²Note to self: get hands on a hardcopy of this book and check for references!
³er, listening to

Image credit: Mark Surman on Flickr. And yes, that is a frog eating a frog. Which I found by doing a Flickr search for Creative Commons-licensed photos using the search term “eat that frog.” I love the Internet.

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