Time Management Tuesday: If The Metaphor Works...

Sometime in the last month or two, I stumbled upon Eat the Frog: Brian Tracy Explains the Truth About Frogs. Tracy is a "success expert" and has a book called...Eat that Frog, about dealing with procrastination.  The Eat the Frog concept is inspired by a Mark Twain quote. "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." To make a quite long story short, Eat the Frog involves doing your biggest and most important task first thing. And if you have two big and important tasks, you hit the biggest and most important task before the less big and important one.

Now, this seems like old wine in a new flask to me. This is not the first time I've seen advice regarding doing the biggest or the most important or the least desirable job first thing in the morning while you've got energy and impulse control, both of which peter out over the course of the day. Though I've also on at least one occasion read a suggestion to do two or three small things so the adrenaline rush of completing them encourages you to take on more.

But Eat the Frog is a metaphor. You're comparing a job you're not enthused about doing to eating a frog, another thing most of wouldn't look forward to. I believe metaphors help us. They can be like mantras. I, for instance, use "staying on task" or "on task" for actual work and for craft. I need to stay on task with a humor piece, with an essay, even a piece of fiction, to keep myself from drifting off topic or theme or losing a character's voice. "Staying on task" comes from back in the day when I was harassing young kids to do any number of things. It is a metaphor I lean on.

One could argue that everyone needs a metaphor. If eating a frog helps you with your workload, embrace it.

A Bizarre Experience Related To Eating And Tim Ferris

I ate this.

For years I've been interested in doing some short-form writing about eating. I'm not talking about food writing, because you need to know something to do that and it tends to be about kinds of food my people don't eat. I've been interested in writing about eating, the kind of eating my people do versus the kind of eating Food Network people and New York Times reading people do.

Eating had a significant role in my very first book, My Life Among the Aliens, and its follow-up, Club Earth. Eating and its connection to social class makes an appearance in The Hero of Ticonderoga. I've done a couple of real eating articles for a publication at Medium, Enough and Mac and Me, both in Kitchen Tales. And then there are some eating adjacent pieces, such as Blackened Pans at The Bigger Picture, which touches upon my time working in a professional, though not restaurant, kitchen.

So the whole eating writing business is a thing for me.

Enough Of The Eating. What About This Tim Ferris Person?

I've been thinking about writing about bread baking for a long time. Last week, while looking for one of my old blog posts to use in a new blog post, I came upon one about bread that I thought I could rework for a submission to one of the Medium publications. That led me to go looking around on my hard drive for bread material that I'd started. And that led me to a link I had kept to How to Become a Great (Food) Writer: The Big Secret even though, as I've already said, I'm not interested in being a food writer, great or otherwise, just an eating writer. 

I will admit I have not yet read every word in this article, because it's interesting and has links I want to follow. It looks good. I need some time. I also got distracted.

I got distracted because of the splendor of the website it was on, which belongs to the Tim Ferris you've been waiting for me to get to. It is difficult for me to be able to say who or what Tim Ferris is, because he's done and does a lot. He appears to be a productivity writer/speaker/podcaster/blogger/what have you, with his productivity interests spread over many things, like cooking, and his productivity ideas, perhaps, evolving. I was overwhelmed by his post on creating a viral book trailer. I was intimidated by his description of marketing for his book The 4 Hour Chef, which appears to be about more than cooking.

So What? There Is A So What, Right?

I have not done much about time management here for quite a while. I use "time management" as an umbrella term for all kinds of things that can impact time. That may be what I'll find at Tim Ferris's site. If so, I may be fired up about time management again.

In the meantime, I have to do some managing and find time to finishing reading his post on how to be a great (food) writer. 

Time Management Tuesday: A Productivity List

From an earlier issue of  The Write Joyce: 10 Simple Steps to Exceptional Daily Productivity. This productivity article includes a number of steps we've discussed here in relation to managing time.

1. Every Sunday night, map out your week. Absolutely. Planning can be the constant we can depend on in a life that is always and rapidly changing. Having a written plan not only keeps you on task, it gives you opportunities to see that you are accomplishing things over the course of the week. Quite honestly, I have not been able to get back to the Sunday night planning routine after a couple of months of upheaval.

2. Actively block out task time.  You can do this Sunday night. You can determine how many units you want to commit various projects. You can also determine when you'll put the time in.

6. Obsess over leveraging edge time. I'm not sure what this author means by "edge time." I can't find the term defined on-line. It sounds as if he's talking about something like transitional time. He's talking about really transitioning from one place to another, though. I don't know that I would suggest people make calls in the car. Listening to audiobooks and professional podcasts are an alternative I'd be more likely to try.

Check out the rest of the ten steps.