If you feel frazzled or distracted at work, try this…
If you feel frazzled or distracted at work, try this…
(this is the only trick that worked for me)
I used to feel super frazzled at the end of the day.
I’d be really busy, day-in-day-out. But in my heart of hearts I knew I wasn’t making any real progress on the things that truly mattered.
Out of all the productivity hacks I tried, nothing really stuck.
The one thing that DID work was surprisingly simple. I wrote about trying it last year, and given it really worked, I thought I’d update you.
It’s called ‘eating the frog’ (created by productivity guru Brian Tracy). It’s loosely based on this quote by Mark Twain:
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” — Mark Twain
How to go about it:
Identify your frog
Every morning before I open my emails, I ask myself: “what’s the frog I have to eat today before I do anything else”.
For me, the “Frog” is the 1 task that’ll make me feel a bit proud of myself at the end of the day.
If it’s a bigger thing that I can’t do in max 1.5 hours. I’ll just pick the first ‘next step’ towards it as my frog.
Eat the frog
Do the task first thing in the morning.
Repeat every day
I started to see quite dramatic results after just 2 weeks. Lots of stuff that was in my ‘important not urgent’ list just started getting done.
Three months later and I was living in a different universe.
Give it a go!
Daniel
P.S. If you’re an in-house lawyer who needs help with any of these things, let me know!
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