Time management – exhausted or confident?

30 November 2015 is the 180th birthday of Mark Twian (1835 – 1910) the famous American writer. The following quote is widely attributed to him ‘If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if It’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first”. However the quote was said for the fist time in 1791 by French writers including Nicolas Chamfort, Émile Zola and Apocryphal a little differently.

Later when quote arrived in English speaking nations it was modified, re-quoted and so goes on the story. The quote became a global phenomenon when picked up by time management gurus. If researched in detail, the quote was not related at all to the time management concept in 1791’s France. It was an advice to people of France to be prepared for worst things happening every day. Searching at amazon.com one can find more than 1200 books dealing with frog eating issue. If you narrow down your search to exact title ‘Eat That Frog’, in Business and Money Category you’ll currently (Nov 2015) find 15 books with that exact title in English language. However, the term is widely being used and I suppose that it is certainly searched few hundred thousand times a year. Google search engine shows that average monthly search for the term ‘eat that frog’ is more than ten thousand.

The simplest explanation about the quote in this aspect is that one should handle the most difficult task as first thing every morning. As per this perception, once you complete that most difficult task i.e. “The Frog” you’ll be highly relaxed and would be ready to happily finish all remaining tasks.

Let me admit that I had been a sincere follower of this school of thought for years until it started to taste bad and started hurting my stomach. Following this very approach greatly diminished my happiness level and my analytical capacity to handle tasks and other issues. However I figured out that this eat the frog idea leads to DBFE states i.e. Depressed, Bored, Frustrated and Exhausted stages. It makes you depressed even a night before to think about the ‘hard’ task for next day for which you have limited capacity, that's why it is labeled as hard!

Therefore I decided to challenge the idea and have put forward a rival model named as hsbc i.e. Happy, Successful, Boosted and Confident stages. In this model you start the day by happily handling the tasks. The happy handling of the tasks then makes you successful that in turns boost your morale. Eating the frog simply exhaust any person while hsbc model would leave any one confident and even lead her to the Creativity stage. I suggest all people who are stressed with deadlines to manage the tasks, to give a try to this approach. I am quite sure that most of them would end up being successful, confident and more creative. Further details about hsbc model can be found at: 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B018PXIBJU?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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View other books in ‘Satisfied Careers’ series by the author: 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6005899.Azhar_Ali