Eating the Frogs

In terms of approaching projects, two things have come to mind today. The first is the use of the phrase ‘best practices.’ I hate that phrase. It implies that in order to do something, to accomplish a goal, to complete a task, one needs to take a particular approach. While this is indeed the case in many instances, and there IS a right way of doing things, it has also created a mentality where we have experts popping up left and right professing that the absolute best way to do something (the best practice) is the way they’ve outlined and/or endorsed. We lose a creative edge when we come up against this mentality. After all, how did we arrive at these best practices in the first place? Through analysis, refinement, development, testing, further refinement, and so on and so forth. It might even be fair to say that ‘best practices’ can only ever correspond to a point in time at which a level of optimization has been reached. So every time I encounter the phrase, I just find myself shuddering a bit. The second thing I’m mulling over today is the idea of eating the frog. We all have frogs. We all need to find a way to deal with them and we all too often put off eating them because, well, it is frankly unpleasant. We don’t enjoy eating them, but we have to learn to eat them if we’re going to make any progress in this crazy world. Of course I don’t mean literally eating frogs. What I mean by frogs are those tasks or to-do items that we’re dreading having to complete. The ominous tasks that we might find to be a drudgery, and therefore we put them off until we decide we just can’t avoid them any longer. Whether it be a deadline, a request from ‘higher up’ or any other impetus, we reach a point where we have to eat them. So doesn’t it make sense to train ourselves to approach the task head-on? To begin to develop a behavior of not procrastinating but instead approaching these things systematically? Here’s what I’m trying to practice. And I say practice, because I don’t think I’ll ever necessarily master it. There are inevitably going to be times when I avoid doing unpleasant things. But I’ve found as I practice this, it permeates more into my regular routine and becomes more a part of my being. Case in point, last night I finished a bowl of popcorn and put the bowl on the counter. I’ll wash it later, I thought to myself. But why? Why not now? There’s nothing pressing I have going on, nothing I must run off and do immediately. So why put it off? This isn’t a frog, but it IS indicative of how our brains start to work when we start to consciously avoid putting things off. When I come to work every day, I have a set of tasks I want to accomplish. I try to look at this list intentionally, and to identify those tasks I am LEAST looking forward to, then deliberately complete as many as possible, as early as possible. If I can eat a frog or two before lunch, I count that as a success. We need to consider how many things we can realistically do in a given day, based on our obligations. If we continue to put off eating the frogs, we’ll just continue to have things build up over time. I’ve had spans of time where it seems like all I do is add things to my list. But then when I take a step back and really look at the list, I realize that many of the things have been carried forward from old lists. And some of those things have been on the list for a LONG time. So I try to eat the frogs. Other things might be easier to accomplish and therefore to cross off the list, but in the grand scheme of things it will just mean that those frogs will still be there the next day. And the next day. And the next. So if we can just be more deliberate about not avoiding these things, it begins to work on other levels and we begin to see the idea of procrastination become just a tiny bit more manageable.

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