Eating the frog first.

You might remember that I am a self-improvement book guru. I love them. I devour them, retaining the parts that I can use and spitting out the rest.

I read a lot on the Web, too. Blogs are like the USA Today for the self-help book guru with a short attention span. I love blogs.

I'm also the queen of "I read somewhere that (enter the latest factoid or cool tip on simple living)" without remembering in which book or at which Web site I found it. Hence, I buy Post-It notes in bulk and my bookmark list on my laptop is a mile long.

One of those cool suggestions I stumbled upon some time ago is the concept of "eating the frog first" when you start your day. I'll be darned if I could remember where I found it, but when I sat down to write this post, a quick Google search showed me it's not just a concept, it's a whole book! My apologies to author Brian Tracy, but this is one of those books I'm gonna' skip. I already get the idea and I can sum it up for you here: do the thing you most dread first to get it out of the way.

Now, in all fairness, Mr. Tracy goes into a little more detail about how to choose priorities and which tasks will make the biggest impact on your day when completed. That might come in handy if I were still a part of the working world, but in my case if I can manage to feed all the living things in this house and make it to the bus stop on time twice a day, we consider it a successful day. Bonus points if I can do a load of laundry and scrub a toilet before the kids get home from school.

Today I'm off to a great start, having polished off two frogs early in the day: scooping out the cat litter box, and matching socks. They are my two most despised housekeeping tasks. I would almost rather eat a real frog than scoop out the litter box. But then I'd have even more cleaning up to do and it wouldn't be pretty.