Graphics Designed by slidesgo / Freepik COPYRIGHT © 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | THEMETALEARNERS.COM List your to-do items for the day, evaluate them based on their importance and urgency, and figure out what needs to be done first. FIRST THINGS FIRST COURSE WORKSHEET | DOMINATE YOUR PROCRASTINATION 2 / 4 COPYRIGHT © 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | THEMETALEARNERS.COM FIRST THINGS FIRST DOMINATE YOUR PROCRASTINATION To “Eat that frog!” means to start your day with the biggest, most important, and most dreaded task. It’s also the task you are most likely to procrastinate on. There are many reasons why doing this is effective, most of which we’ve already talked about in this course. In short, getting rid of the most important task for the day first, makes a huge difference for our procrastination , mainly because once you do that, your day is already a success. Also, our energy levels are higher in the morning , which also helps a lot with our procrastination and effectiveness. Now, let’s see how you can actually bring the “Eat That Frog!” concept into your own life. First, you need to identify the task that is triggering your procrastination the most ... a task that will also have a great impact on your life at this moment. Sometimes it’s quite obvious what that is, but other times, we need to be deliberate in discovering that task. The next step is to actually focus on this part of your day . If you do this process correctly, the first thing you do will be the most important task you do all day. It makes sense, then, that you use all the forcing functions that you’ve identified to help you actually do the work. This is the time of day that you need to pull out all the stops and limit yourself as much as possible - or as much as necessary. Moreover, you should focus your accountability process on this part of the day as well . What is more important than your Most Important Task of the day anyway? In addition to these, the environment in which you work on your frog is the one you should more deliberately design to assist you with the work. In short, every technique that you’ve learned should be applied here so that you get this morning chunk of work done! Use this worksheet to identify your “frog”, and to put all your work for the day in the correct order! You can use it every day if you want to, or at least when you have tons to do and you are facing a lot of procrastination. 3 / 4 COPYRIGHT © 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | THEMETALEARNERS.COM FIRST THINGS FIRST DOMINATE YOUR PROCRASTINATION Check the next page for extra guidelines on how to choose what to work on first. TOTAL URGENCY IMPORTANCE TASK Let’s identify what you should work on today. The first goal of this exercise is to identify your “frog” - your most important task of the day . The second goal is to put everything else in order , too. Knowing what to work on in a day, and in what order, makes it much easier to avoid procrastinating. Start by writing all the tasks you have to do in the first column - a standard to-do list. Then on the second column, evaluate how important they are, on a scale from 1-5, where 1 is the MOST important . On the third column, evaluate how urgent they are, on a scale from 1-5, where 1 is the MOST urgent . Then, on the last column, add the two numbers. The lowest scores are the items you should work on first. 4 / 4 COPYRIGHT © 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. | THEMETALEARNERS.COM FIRST THINGS FIRST DOMINATE YOUR PROCRASTINATION First, for your “frog”, you want to make sure that you choose something that has an importance score of 1 or 2 . You may have more urgent items in your list, but for the first task of your day, you want to focus on importance over urgency . So, if one of the 3 lowest totals has an importance score of 3 or higher, cross it off from the list. If you are down to 1 option already, great! You already know what to work on! If not, take a good look at your options. Which one of those REALLY triggers your procrastination? Which one holds you back from doing actual productive work? We want to use this part of our day to relieve procrastination too. If you can separate one out by answering this question, then that’s what you should start with. If not, choose based on the total score. If there is a tie in the total, choose the most important item first. If the importance column is also a tie, then just pick one and start with that! Now that you’ve identified the most important task of your day, use the field below to break the task down into steps, and then to identify forcing functions that you’ll use to make sure you get the work done. Alternatively, you can use the “Utilizing Forcing Functions” worksheet. You now have a list of what you should work on, and in what order. Before you go on, let’s go a bit deeper in evaluating your options for the most important task of the day. For this stage, you will evalu- ate only the top 3 from the previous step (a.k.a. the 3 lowest scores). Write them below.