Best way to prioritize tasks - eat the frog!:)

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If you keep a list of all the things you need to do, sometimes it could get overwhelming.  I keep track of my work and personal tasks in Wunderlist and as soon as I tick off a few tasks, there are new ones to do.

In the book "Eat That Frog" by Brian Tracy, he refers to your "frog" as your biggest and most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it.  It is also the one task that can have the greatest impact on your life and results at the moment.

Thus, he says, if you have to eat two frogs, you have to eat the uglier one first.

This means you always have to tackle the biggest, hardest and most important task first before moving on to something else.  Because sometimes, our natural inclination is to tackle the easier ones to immediately get them off our list.

As a rule of thumb, we could also apply the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule by asking ourselves -

Which 20% of our activities will account for 80% of our results? 

Which 20% of our customers will account for 80% of our sales?

Which 20% of our products and services will account for 80% of our profits?

Which 20% of our tasks will account for 80% of the value of what we do?

So the next time you feel swamped with things to do, just ask yourself if what you're about to do is part of the top 20% or the bottom 80%. If you have 10 tasks, focus on the top 2 because they could possibly be worth 5 to 10x more than all the other 8 remaining tasks combined.