This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more possibilities
and opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals than exist today. As
perhaps never before in human history, you are actually drowning in options. In
fact, there are so many good things you can do that your ability to decide among
them may be the critical determinant of what you accomplish in life.
If you are like most people today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and
too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new tasks and responsibilities just
keep rolling in, like the tides. Because of this, you will never be able to do
everything you have to do. You will never be caught up. You will always be behind
in some of your tasks and responsibilities, and probably in many of them.
For this reason, and perhaps more than ever before, your ability to select your
most important task at each moment, and then to start on that task and get it done
both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than
any other quality or skill you can develop.
An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting
important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot
and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.
It has been said for many years that 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
that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.
Your "frog" is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to
procrastinate on if you don't do something about it now. It is also the one task that
can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.
It has also been said, "If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."
This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you,
start with the biggest, hardest,...