I overcame procrastination….

You may have noticed that there has not been a post for several days on my blog…..well the frog won for a few days.  That is the frog of procrastination.

The frog of procrastination is probably one of the biggest threats to network marketers – allowing the fear of not knowing what to do next, or the fear of  how to write an article, or build your blog, or any other of 100s of other things you need to do to move your business forward.  I allowed myself to become overwhelmed by the frog of what to write for my next article that it became easier to make “busy work” than to face the hurdle head on and tackle it.  I chose to do things that didnt accomplish a single thing to move my business forward – I cleaned my desk, I rewrote address and contact lists, I reread training that I have got down pat, and on and on……What I needed to do was to take a step back – break things down into one thing at a time and move forward.

From past experience I am well aware of the power of straying from the important things and allowing myself to get off track.  There is a saying that talks about eating a frog first thing every morning and you can be assured that nothing worse will happen that day.  How true – I really cant imagine anything worse – but if we put things in perspective while striving to building our network business every day we need to evaluate what things we need to be doing – we need to priortize, we need to review the importance of each of our tasks, we need to remember the 80/20 rule and move….move…move.

Brian Tracy has taught me many valuable lessons…..not the least how to Eat the Frog……I went back to his book and reviewed and got back on track.

An excerpt from
Eat That Frog!
by Brian Tracy

The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also called the “Pareto Principle” after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the “vital few”, the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many”, the bottom 80 percent.

He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle as well. For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times or more than the other eight items put together.

Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks
Here is an interesting discovery. Each of the ten tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks will contribute five or ten times the value of any of the others.

Often, one item on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, Not Accomplishments
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

Before you begin work, always ask yourself, “Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?”

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

Motivate Yourself
Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and helps you to overcome procrastination. Time management is really life management, personal management. It is really taking control of the sequence of events. Time management is having control over what you do next. And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is. As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much happier as a result. This should be your way of working as well.

Have you eaten your Frog today?

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