Eat That Frog!
21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time
Brian Tracy · 2001 · Productivity
11 min · 10 chaptersNarrated in your voice
Original summary · AI-drafted, human-published · added by Library
What it's about
Brian Tracy argues that the gap between high performers and everyone else is not talent or time but the willingness to tackle the hardest, most consequential task first, before anything else steals the day. Drawing on decades of sales and management consulting, he offers a set of blunt, mechanical rules for choosing what matters and doing it immediately. The book mattered because it turned productivity advice away from tools and toward a single behavioral habit: start with discomfort, not convenience.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A manager who ends most days having answered emails but not moved any real project forward. - A freelancer or student who reorganizes to-do lists instead of starting the task they dread. - Anyone who has read time-management books before and wants one idea they can act on tomorrow, not a system.
What’s inside
- 1The Frog Is the Task You're Avoiding1 min
The single highest-value task on your list is almost always the one you're most tempted to postpone, and postponing it quietly taxes everything else you do that day.
- 2Decide Before the Day Starts1 min
Productivity fails less from lack of time than from never deciding, in advance, what today's task actually is.
- 3Big Goals Force Small Priorities1 min
You cannot rank daily tasks correctly unless you already know, in specific and written form, what you're trying to achieve over the next months and years.
- 4Plan Every Day in Advance, on Paper1 min
Planning a day takes measurable time but returns far more than it costs, and skipping it is a false economy.
- 5Apply the ABCDE Method to Break Ties1 min
When several tasks all feel important, a simple forced-ranking system beats intuition at telling you which one actually is.
- 6Concentrate on One Task Until It's Done1 min
Switching between tasks doesn't save time, it multiplies the time each task takes, because attention has to be rebuilt from scratch after every interruption.
- 7Break the Frog Down if It's Too Big to Swallow Whole1 min
A task that looks too large to start is usually a task that hasn't been divided into a first physical action small enough to actually begin.
About Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is a Canadian-American author and speaker who built his career in sales training and corporate consulting after working manual labor and sales jobs in his twenties. He has written more than seventy books, mostly aimed at salespeople and managers, and Eat That Frog!, first published in 2001, became his best-known work outside the sales field.
What readers say
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