The Frog You Eat and the Frog That Boils You

There’s a book called Eat That Frog, by Brian Tracy. The idea is simple: find the task you least want to do, and do it first. Eat the frog before breakfast, and the rest of the day gets easier. I built a real practice around this years ago. Frogs get deferred, delegated, or deleted — deliberately, never by accident. It made me more productive than almost anything else I’ve tried.

There’s an older adage about a different frog. Put it in tepid water and raise the heat slowly enough, and it never jumps. It just sits there while the water climbs toward boiling.

I spent a career mastering the first frog. Last week, I realized the second one had gotten me anyway.

The week after every board meeting, I take stock. Fifteen years of doing this, at least. It’s become reflex — approvals happen at the table, follow-up tasks land in the days after, and the next agenda starts building itself before the last one’s fully closed. You get used to the rhythm. Work fills whatever space is between the dates. The water warms a degree at a time, and you don’t feel any single degree of it.

Early in my career, that heat caught up with me. I was busy constantly and productive rarely — busy on the wrong things, which is its own kind of tired. I sat down one day and made a list, then broke it apart against my actual calendar, and started separating what mattered from what was just noise wearing a deadline. That became a habit I still run: ninety minutes, once a month, looking ahead at the next ninety days. I call it my 90 for 90.

The pages live in a three-ring binder, tabbed by month, each June sitting next to last June. Every week I go back through and mark what got done, what got in the way, and what needs to carry forward. Do this long enough and the binder stops being a planning tool. It becomes a mirror. You stop just scheduling your life and start actually seeing it.

This month I looked ahead to July, August, September — same ritual I’ve run for fifteen years. Except retirement has changed what goes on the page. It hasn’t changed whether the practice still works.