When told to pick the ugliest thing out of the list of things provided, it should be well anticipated that there will be some form of hesitation before one finally picks it. A part of me even wants to believe that if you offer a series of toys to a child and ask the child to pick the ugliest one, I would not be surprised if the child rejects it or goes for something else.
Well, that is what the renowned author Brian Tracy tells us to do in his book Eat the Frog. Although I have to clarify, he is not exactly saying you should choose the most odd-looking thing; rather, he is talking about tackling the most difficult before moving on to the remaining things on the list.
His book, Eat the Frog, talks about productivity and the need to deal with the tough things on the list first before dealing with others. The book is quite old, published in 2001, which is a whole lot of years, that is 24 years if I am not mistaken, and to date, the book's content still remains relevant in today's world.
In an attempt to tackle procrastination, Brian Tracy links to having two frogs, and you are cut off in the process of picking one out of the two. He suggests you should go for the ugliest one. First, I do not know why anyone wants to eat a frog, but I get that it is just a metaphor for having things to do on your list. Dealing with the ugliest frog means taking care of the toughest one first before heading off to the rest on the list.
It is like having several things to do on your to-do list. The approach Brian recommends is to look for the one that will give you the toughest time doing it. Then start with that one. This is because when it is done, all you have are just simple tasks to handle. Take, for example, I have work to do, and I know my toughest challenge will be cooking what I have to eat for the day. Writing and playing chess are also on the list, but these are tasks that are easy for me to do. When I perform these tasks, I hardly break a sweat, but when it comes to cooking, it could take me a minute or even more. Now cooking is the toughest thing to do on the list, so by abiding by Brian Tracy's quote of If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first, that means the cooking has to be done first. Now, when the biggest hurdle has been overcome, it is only a straightforward sprint that is left to deal with.
In the book, the author also talks about how it becomes easy to procrastinate the remaining things left on the list. Imagine I went ahead to write and play chess, leaving the cooking for the last thing on the list, I am quite certain I would have found it easy to procrastinate cooking to another time or probably another day, leaving me to settle for junk food as the meal for the entire day.
With this, I guess it is why people tend to start their day with early morning exercises but if you could go through all that body work for an hour or two, over time you would no longer be worried about something going wrong for the remaining day or you would not get so downcasted when the day goes bad since you have dealt with the toughest workout in the day.
Brian Tracy's Eat the Frog is more than two decades old, but its knowledge can still be used in today's world to tackle the distractions around causing procrastination.