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What it argues
Eat That Frog! is Brian Tracy's short, direct manual for beating procrastination through systematic prioritization. The title comes from a Mark Twain observation: if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. Tracy applies this as a daily practice: identify your most important and most dreaded task, and do it before anything else.
Tracy's twenty-one techniques are organized around a core principle: personal effectiveness is about doing the most valuable things first, not doing more things faster. He introduces the ABCDE method for prioritizing tasks — A tasks are things you must do, B tasks are things you should do, C tasks are nice to do, D tasks should be delegated, and E tasks should be eliminated. The rule is never to do a B task while any A task remains undone.
What it gets right
- 1.
Eat your frog first: do your most important and most difficult task before anything else each morning. This single habit transforms daily output more than any time-management system.
- 2.
The ABCDE method separates tasks into five categories from must-do to eliminate. Never start a B task while any A task is incomplete.
- 3.
The 80/20 rule means 20% of activities produce 80% of results. Identifying and protecting time for the high-value 20% is more important than being efficient across all tasks.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American author, speaker, and motivational trainer who has written more than eighty books on sales, leadership, and personal effectiveness. He started his career with no college education, working his way up through sales before building a training and consulting company that has served hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. Eat That Frog!, published in 2001 and updated in 2017, is his most widely read work and has sold more than five million copies in forty languages. He is based in San Diego.
